Namely, it proved that the DVD collection at the library is not going to wither away and die, but is still being replenished with new titles.
You may recall that I recently expressed a worry that on my most recent visit to the library, the titles all looked very familiar -- like, they hadn't gotten in anything new in the past year. Which makes a certain amount of sense, as the library spent about half that time closed.
But The New Mutants gives definitive lie to that concern, as the film was not even released yet a year ago. The theatrical release, or the pandemic equivalent thereof, was last August 28th -- which was already more than two-and-a-half years delayed from its possible original release date given bumps in the road that I won't go into now. It didn't hit home video until November.
So this is all to the good, in terms of the ongoing viability of DVDs, which I am celebrating during the current extended viewing marathon.
As this is a pretty new DVD, there were no scratches leading to no technical flaws, and one thing that was nice about this DVD compared to the others I've watched this week is that it had a title menu montage of images from the film. That had been standard practice during DVD's heydey, but cheaper DVDs -- like the ones I watched this week, I guess -- usually just have a still image, and would be lucky if they even got any music. The New Mutants had both moving images and a little 30-second clip of ominous score that played on repeat along with the images. I appreciated that.
There were some things I appreciated about the movie as well, including the cast, which features teen and post-teen actors from a lot of popular TV shows, such as Stranger Things (Charlie Heaton) and Game of Thrones (Maisie Williams). Then of course it has Anya Taylor Joy, one of our most watchable young actresses, who is also the star of a popular TV limited series (Queen's Gambit), but that would have only been a twinkle in her eye back when the movie was made.
It actually reminded me most of another TV show, one whose second season is currently curling my toes. That's The Boys. Each of these "new mutants" discovered their powers in a scenario that was tragic for someone they loved, or maybe, someone they didn't love, but someone who was in close proximity to them. There's a lot of that collateral gore in The Boys. And though I feel like The Boys has the advantage by dealing with superheroes running through people -- sometimes literally -- rather than mutants doing the same, because we've all already seen about ten X-Men movies and don't necessarily find this stuff surprising anymore in that context, it's actually splitting hairs when you come right down to it. I mean, what's the real difference between a mutant and one of The Boys' supes, anyway?
And there's a bit of that great Boys gore here, too. Clearly The New Mutants is meant for a younger audience than The Boys, but that doesn't mean this movie is sanitized. There's a scene where one of the mutants transforms into a werewolf (that's her power) and scratches the hell out of her adversary. Instead of that person being completely fine, that person is totally fucked up, stumbling around while trying to cover serious wounds, and I really thought that was a good detail.
Another thing I appreciated was that the central romance in the movie was between two women, or girls really, since they are supposed to be teenagers. That's Williams' character and the one played by Blu Hunt. Although studios are becoming more courageous about this nowadays, it really would have seemed extra daring when filming was completed four years ago, in 2017.
Lastly I thought some of the visual effects were better than I expected them to be for a film that obviously didn't have a huge budget. I say that because it all takes place in one location, an institution where the mutants are housed to contain their powers until they are mature enough to master them. That part of the movie may have been done on the cheap, but the effects are not. There's a giant CGI bear in the finale that looks really cool.
Given the litany of positive things I just listed about The New Mutants, I guess I liked this movie a little more than I originally thought -- as recently as when I started writing this about a half-hour agao.
Now, this is not a Marvel Studios movie, but it does have the Marvel logo at the beginning as being in association with Marvel, like most of the previous X-Men movies that Fox released. I think these companies are all one now anyway, so it doesn't really matter anymore. But this did lead me to believe I might find this movie on Disney+. Surprisingly, I did not.
Nor did I find it on any of my other streaming services, so that means DVDs now hold a 3-1 lead over streaming in this series in terms of their unique (free) availability to me.
I haven't yet decided whether I'm going to continue this series unabated through the weekend nights. However, I may, as we found out that our COVID self-isolation may be able to end next Thursday if all goes well and we get a second negative test on Wednesday. (Oops, burying the lede -- all four of us tested negative yesterday.)
They've backdated our 14 days' isolation to the date of our possible exposure, when we had assumed it would be from the date we were told to self-isolate. So if it does end next Thursday, that might be a good ending point for this series, and it means I might want to watch more DVDs over the weekend and not take a break after all.
In any case, I might combine them all into one weekend post if I do. I have one other blog post pending and I can't just drop everything else for a full two weeks, now can I?
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