I watched this on HBOmax yesterday. I wouldn't say it was bad
I will. I will say it was bad.
I also read New Mutants from issue #1, but it's not just that. They missed many wide-open chances to link this to the larger X-Men lore, that were interwoven in the comics, and almost completely failed. In the comics, the "demon bear" was an appearance/ploy by a long-running... well... Adversary, who bedeviled the X-Men
and New Mutants repeatedly over the years, to the point that he could only be defeated by the X-Men sacrificing themselves (but Roma, the guardian of reality, brought them back in Australia).
All of the characters were depressingly one-dimensional versions of their comic selves, too. Which was meta-depressing given how so much more characterization there has been in the other X-verse films than not.
And they
utterly wasted Lockheed, one of my favorite elements from the comics. I will never forgive that.
the bastardization of an actual native proverb to fit their narrative which I didn't really think was a cool thing to do
Is it, though? The oldest attribution I can find is in Christian Evangelical circles starting in the mid-'60s, being
attributed to something purportedly said to a missionary by a Native convert. There's a lot to it that smacks of "something white people say that they think sounds like indigenous wisdom" from the same period of cultural appropriation that brought us Yoga and Neopaganism. The Cherokee cultural site makes mention of it, but with no historic attribution or origin, and quotes verbatim the variants of the stories in Evangelical accounts, so I am sus.
All in all, I am glad Disney owns Fox now and the X-verse will be getting some sort of reboot down the road, just so I can take comfort this film will be nullified. I had high hopes and I don't like saying that. I'd actually like to see most of the actors come back to reprise their roles in a fresh take (but know that would be confusing). I definitely don't blame them. It was a well-cast, well-acted travesty.