tbk83

First let me say that the visuals and animation by themselves are great. It's up there with the best in recent years. Also the music is well done, as you would expect from Kanji Hawaii.

But.

This movie has just too much of everything. It bombards you non-stop with plot twists and pathos delivered with bombastic music and grandiose visuals. There are way too many characters crying (or almost crying) way too much. Most of them are either so naive and innocent it hurts (mostly themselves), or just ruthless and one dimensional. 100 years or are compressed in to less than 2 hours. It has political intrigue, big scale wars, dragons, implied rape, magical (?) looms, attempted suicide and much more. There is just no time to breathe.

Most character development is off-screen, and in many cases that makes it hard to understand why a character acts the way they do. Most of the themes and concepts are interesting and have a lot of potential, but are barely explored. Instead, the movie hits you over the head with how inspiring and/or tragic everything is until you get numb to it.

They should have made this a tv show with at the very least 13 episodes, or omitted everything but the very core concept of a mother aging slower than her child.

I admit the ending got to me despite everything I'm complaining about, and the visuals, as mentioned, are amazing. So it still gets a 5/10.

This could have been a solid first entry in to a hypothetical New Mutants trilogy, as was planned by the director. Unfortunately Disney buying FOX stopped that from happening before the movie was even out. That is really a shame, because as a fan of the New Mutants I found this quite enjoyable, if somewhat overly grimdark. I especially liked that Magik was allowed to keep her magical abilities, even though the FOX X-Men universe never really had supernatural elements before. (However, they did have aliens out of nowhere in the last movie.) That said, if seeing these characters in live-action for the first time isn't a selling point for you this movie is definetly skippable. It's fine as a stand-alone mildy scary young-adult-novel-like flick to watch on when bored, but that's about it. No major flaws, but nothing impressive either.

I have never been anywhere near an elite US college, so I can't say how realistic the show is - but it's certainly not one-sided. Yes, the title makes it sound like a 10-part lecture about white privilege. I assure you it's not. I think it's more of a political Rorschach test. Whatever your position on racial relations in the US is, it's probably brought up within the show. However, it will never be clearly endorsed or dismissed, just revealed as somewhat hypocritical.

Sure, SJWs can watch this and act like it supports all of their talking points, but they'd have to ignore more than a few subtle jabs at victim culture and student activism. In the last few episodes the entire escalating situation is depicted as something of a (tragic) farce, with almost no winners at all.

If anything, that's the message.