Genre and The New Mutants

Because this movie is still pretty new, I’m going to put a spoiler warning right here. There will be spoilers for the movie throughout.

The New Mutants went through one of the longest and weirdest roads to being released. On October 12, 2017, the movie had its first trailer come out, touting an April 13, 2018 release date. After rumors of reshoots, Disney’s purchase of Fox, and the start of a global pandemic, The New Mutants finally hit theatres on August 26, 2020. Though, with theatres being incredibly restricted (if not outright closed) during the pandemic, it is more accurate to cite its DVD release date of November 17, 2020 for when it really became available to be seen.

Based on the concept, I should have loved this movie. So much of what it is feels like something that could make up one of my new favourites. This movie follows five teenagers locked in an asylum where they need to learn to control their burgeoning mutant powers before moving on to what they believe could be the X-Men. The asylum becomes a haunted house, where the group is forced to face their darkest fears or be killed by them. And not only that, but they eventually discover that they aren’t being trained to be X-Men, but to be killers for Essex Corp (aka, the X-Men villain Mr. Sinister). It sounds like Buffy as more of an ensemble, but if the Watchers were totally evil (and not just assholes). The movie even shows clips from Buffy, which only serves to force the comparison.

After watching The New Mutants, it isn’t quite that at all. It’s… fine. It’s not as bad as some people have made it out to be, but it’s not amazing. As the credits rolled, I turned to the friend I was watching it with and said that it makes sense that there were so many reshoots, because its biggest issue was that it felt like at least three different movies edited together. It wasn’t terrible so much as it was just disjointed. Though, I later saw that the rumored reshoots never happened, and instead it was only editing that changed in the years of between when it was meant to come out and when it did.

So, I want to talk about what makes this movie feels so disjointed, which primarily comes down to its use of genre.

Why Does Genre Matter?

Before talking about how The New Mutants uses genre, it’s important to talk about what genre even is, and why it is important.

Genre can be boiled down to a series of categories that organize materials based off particular patterns, tropes, and character archetypes. In narrative fiction, this often means patterns in how a story plays out. This could be something as broad as an action movie (which means there is a high degree of action scenes), or as specific as superhero action spy-thriller (a combination with much more particular tropes that will most likely be involved).

For example, if we know a movie is a romantic comedy, we can generally guess the structure the movie will follow. Two people will come together in the beginning, realize how much the love each other around the middle, something happens to break them up soon after that, but in the climax of the movie their love brings them back together.

But that’s not everything that comes with the rom-com genre. They often use character archetypes like the carefree and fun person and the hard working, incredibly serious person who need each other to kind of balance out.  Or there are tropes like the relationship begins with false pretenses such as a lie (which is what ends up breaking them up before they get back together). Massive lists could be made of each genre and what is common to be found in them.

While this may sound like may sound like a way to create homogenized stories that are designed to be as cookie cutter as possible (which is exactly how Hallmark Christmas movies work), genre doesn’t need to be as strict as that. Often times, it is simply an important aspect to setting expectations.

It’s very common for people to leave a comedy movie talking about how funny or not funny it was, or a leave a horror movie talking about how scary or not scary it was, but the reverse is almost never true.

We set our expectations for what a movie should be, by what genre it seems to belong to, and that’s how we tend to judge it. This expectation could be set by the movie itself or by the promotional material. Either way, sometimes it doesn’t work out. A movie could be using all the usual tropes of a comedy, but not get any laughs. Or a trailer could show every funny moment in a more serious movie, leading to expectation of a comedy when it is trying to be a drama.

Genre is also important because the existence of these expectations creates an opportunity to subvert them. A movie like Deadpool works as well as it does because audiences are so familiar with the genre of superhero movies, so when it subverts the tropes or even just makes fun of them, the audience understands what is being done.

While the broadest level of a genre (ie: horror, comedy, action, drama, etc) can remain relatively stable, subgenres are far more malleable over time. As subgenres get more and more specific, the tropes and patterns all become much more prevalent. But as time passes and the trope is subverted, often times that subversion of the trope takes over as the new trope.

Basically, genre is about the expectation and can act like a kind of template from which to judge how we felt about a particular movie. And, each genre comes with its own listen of things that are usually associated with them.

The Genres of The New Mutants

The New Mutants plays most heavily with three genres. One at a time, let’s get into what each one means in a very general kind of way.

It is a superhero action movie; an origin story if we want to get even more specific. This means we’re going to be seeing one or more characters who are going to be given some reason to fight some form of villain. If they have superpowers, they will probably be questioning why they were the ones who received these abilities the first place. They will also probably have some big incident that pushes them to use their powers to be a hero (this being doubly true for heroes without superpowers). There is also going to be an extent to which beating the villain is something they feel that only they can do. And, being an action movie, these generally have some interesting fight scenes.

It is also a haunted house horror movie. This generally means that a group of people find themselves in a house that they have come to either by choice or by force, but by the end they will not have any way to leave. Scary things will start to happen, with some degree of supernatural elements. These incidents will start off small, and the people who don’t experience them won’t believe the people who do (maybe even the people who do experience will write it off as a dream at first). The tension builds, often in the form of a mystery, until it seems that the characters will have find a way to either defeat some kind of spirit or escape the house before they are killed. Some people probably will be killed.

And finally, it is a teen comedy-drama, in the vein of a John Hughes movie (most notably, The Breakfast Club). This will be about a group of teens, some (if not all) of which are considered misfits. They are thrown into something together, but they don’t all get along. Through getting to know each other, their misconceptions are changed, and they realize they aren’t so different after all.

As disparate as these three can seem, there is actually a lot of potential for great interplay between them. If they feed into each other, it could lead to something both great and original.

Both the superhero and horror elements build characters who are often beaten down through most of the movie until the final climax when they can overcome the villain or supernatural entity. Then there’s the teen movie which relies so heavily on its characters and their interactions as they let their walls down around each other. This could be a strong compliment to the characters facing their darkest fears as they are forced through the horror elements of this, or as they come to learn what they can do for themselves in the superhero side of this.

All of this is to say, on paper, this is a really cool idea. So why didn’t it work in the actual movie?

The New Mutants’ Use of Genre

The examples I am about to cite as problems are not meant to be comprehensive in any way, but rather the ones that are most egregious. The idea being that the same mindset that could solve them, could be taken to run through the rest of it.

One of the best examples of why this movie feels so disjointed comes in somewhere around a third of the way through its runtime.

First there is a long scene in which the characters mess around with a lie detector. It functions as a way to have the characters open up in a superficial way, to create more impact when they give the full truths later on. One story we hear is from Sam, where he tells us the coal that he carries around was given to him by his father before he died. He also insists that he belongs in this place.

The very next scene has Dr. Reyes lecturing the group. In this scene, Sam confesses to having nightmares, and wants to leave to go home. Almost demanding to be allowed to go. The scene ends when he storms off, claiming that Dr. Reyes isn’t listening to him.

Next, Illyana reveals she spiked Dr. Reyes’s tea, and now they have the run of the asylum to do whatever they want. Cue the montage of dancing and playing around, in which Dani and Rahne have tambourines, while Sam and Roberto have a great time playing with a wheelchair.

This section epitomizes the biggest problem with The New Mutants lack of cohesion. Each scene on its own has potential (although, admittedly, the lie detector bit is a little too forced) and plays with a key moment from either the horror or teen genres that it belongs to. The problem is that their placement next to each other doesn’t build in any way, it just feels like random moments.

It plays with a scene that acts to set up elements for the teen movie, then one that continues the horror movie, and ends on a montage that builds more on the teen movie. There is likely a way to make these general scenes work together, but is worsened by the use of Sam.

Let’s look at it all from Sam’s perspective. First the scene where he tells the others he belongs here, followed by a scene where he gets upset over not being allowed to leave, followed by one where he is just goofing around. At the very least, for this to work, there should be more time between these events. If Sam sees the vision of the mine between the first two scenes, then his change in temperament would work. Or, if he was even more closed off and/or talked about being haunted by something in the lie detector scene, the following scene might work. But as it stands, it doesn’t really make sense, he seems to be almost contradicting himself in order to play up whichever genre he is in for the given scene.

And to have what is essentially a carefree party montage directly after he storms out with nothing to build to it, it feels like he is just told he’s back in the teen movie all of a sudden. This could be fixed with even a short scene of the group, or even just one of them, coming to Sam and trying to make him feel better. The montage could have been about helping him, or they could have not included him in it.

While we’re on the subject of Sam, let’s go back and look at his one scene in which we see his greatest fear. Sam is the first character to face one of these moments. He is nodding off in the laundry room, when he notices the washer going a little crazy. When he goes to check it out, he finds himself in a strange combination of a mine and the asylum. The shadowed faces of the miners turn to stare at him as he makes his way further in, until he eventually finds his father at the end. His father turns to reveal his face is bleeding, and he asks what Sam has done. Suddenly Sam is hit so hard that he is knocked back against the wall in the laundry room and sees the washer is broken.

Much like the individual scenes in the first sequence I brought up, this scene works on its own. Sure, it’s weird that Sam is falling asleep in a laundry room, but not so much so that it ruins it. But this scene is failed by the rest of the movie. Sam reveals to Roberto later on that when his powers activated, he was in the mine, and this resulted in the death of not only his father, but all the miners. The vision Sam had in the laundry room was a reminder of the worst moment in his life. But then it’s dropped. Not only that, but Sam is the one most insistent that these visions aren’t real, even after he was physically thrown across a room and witnessed damage to a washing machine because of the vision.

Sam never faces another of these fear visions brought on by Dani’s powers. He never even seems to do anything to come to terms with what he’s done, and yet, at the end of the movie he throws the coal away. This is a moment that seems to be saying he going to stop holding on to his past, that he is getting over the accident he caused, but it is completely unearned by the movie. It seems to happen because it feels like a moment his character would have in a teen movie, but they didn’t do the work to get there.

The climax is when the superhero action movie comes out the strongest. It’s there throughout, with powers coming out occasionally, but it is here that the movie shifts entirely to action. Illyana’s smiling men and Dani’s demon bear are both there to be fought and there are some ways in which this works with all three genres. It is this fusion of fighting their personal fears as the villains and coming together as a group in order to help each other succeed. It’s another moment where the concept is definitely there, but it still fails most of the characters.

Roberto, Rahne, and Sam are never forced to defeat their fears in any way. The way they act seems to tell us they have grown, but we don’t see any of the actual growth happening on screen. Rahne gets a second brand but never gets to stand up to the reverend, she only gets to fight the bear. Sam chooses to go back to help Illyana but choosing to use his powers in a large open field doesn’t compare to the guilt he feels for having used them in a confided space. And then there is Roberto, who’s entire “growth” comes from being forced to carry Dani where he is just told he won’t hurt her, and then a moment where he uses his powers just because he is told to “nut up”.

One major shift that could have helped The New Mutants greatly, would have been to put more emphasis on the horror, as well as have everything else stem from it. When Sam opens up to Roberto about what happened in the mine, it feels like it is happening there just because it is a beat that needs to be hit, mot because Sam has any reason to open up. If these kinds of moments are brought out instead because the characters literally see each other’s traumas in the visions and then confront each other, or at least have the admissions happen more closely after the single character faces them, than they will feel more earned.

The same thing could be said about the action at the end of the movie. When the smiling men attack the asylum, it would be much more powerful to watch the teens all deal with their trauma. If Reverend Craig, Sam’s father, and Roberto’s girlfriend were all there too, forcing them to face what they have done to be able to move past it, it would feel more agonizing as they go through it. This would again combine the tropes of all its genres in a satisfying where, whereas the smiling men on their own feels like it leans too heavily on the superhero genre where an army of creatures that look entirely the same is fairly regular.

Then there is the character of Dr. Reyes. She is most akin to the principal from Breakfast Club, who is an antagonist foil. In some respects, that can work, but the superhero genre is one that often requires a real villain. Her problem is she plays both sides between helping and hindering the group too much to fall into any real position. If she plays more of a skeptic to all the supernatural elements, who unknowingly works for this big bad that we never see, she could go deeper into a kind of horror archetype. She could have been a good person doing questionable things (but never so outright bad as trying to kill Dani while giving a villain monologue), and then having her killed by the bear could have worked.

Conversely, she could have been much more villainous herself. If she acted more under her own authority, making the awful choices herself rather than being mildly hesitant as a computer gave her orders, she could have played much stronger into the superhero genre. There is even potential for her to have been doing her tests on Dani to purposely torture the kids with their fears (with an explanation of doing it to make them stronger or weed out the weak). In this case, she should be fought by the group themselves rather than eaten by the bear. This could change the fears into acting as a reason to develop the characters and essentially distract them, until conquering their fears and learning the truth about Reyes brings them to a point where they can defeat her.

It also wouldn’t hurt to drop the Essex Corporation reveal entirely (apart from maybe a post credits scene). Basically, Mr. Sinister’s set up is given far too much screen time for something with zero payoff in this movie.

Conclusions

The original trailer for The New Mutants (from 2017) doesn’t show too too much. It is almost more about setting tone than giving it all away. But what it does show, reveals that quite a bit probably changed from its original completion to its release. The horror scenes hit harder at the very least, only to be toned down for the final result. So who knows what the original intention was behind most of this.

Conceptually, The New Mutants is a great movie. Unfortunately, the lack of balance in the ways in which it uses its diverse genres keeps it from feeling like a singular piece. Using the tropes of each genre in complimentary ways could have built a stronger movie, but instead they seemed randomly placed together in ways that didn’t allow for any real cohesion. While there are other problems with this movie, most of them would be either solved or at least less evident by allowing the genres to find a kind of synchronicity.