Summary

• Mutants in the MCU face challenges due to diverse powers and acceptance issues from "normals."
• "Firebase" on Netflix tells a mutant tale without overt superhero elements, focusing on strong narrative.
• Marvel's mutant properties now in MCU, slowly integrating with the release of Deadpool & Wolverine.

Marvel Studios has experienced small-screen success with its Avengers and Defenders offshoots, but its mutant properties have been a bit more tortured. This lack of tangible presence is due in part to a fractured creative universe that is slowly coming together. That, in turn, has led to legal disputes between studio partnerships and shallow characters that were intended to superficially resemble fan favorites.

Within Marvel Comics canon, a mutant is an evolutionary step beyond merely human, designated Homo superior. Unlike their more socially accepted superhuman brethren, they are born with their powers, which often reveal themselves during adolescence. They are feared, shunned, segregated, and hunted, frequently with the approval of the United States government. A 2021 Netflix science fiction short film anthology from Oats Studios (an independent film studio founded by Neill Blomkamp) features an entry, "Firebase," that pits two men against one another. Without ever mentioning the "m" word or the letter "x," "Firebase" manages to tell a compelling mutant tale and become Netflix's X-Men.

Updated by Timothy Blake Donohoo on February 22, 2024: Though Marvel Studios now owns the rights to the X-Men following Disney's acquisition of 20th Century Fox, mutants are only now being introduced in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This will ramp up with the release of Deadpool & Wolverine, which ties into the Fox X-Men movies. Though only one of the MCU Disney+ shows so far even mentions mutants, there was a science fiction special on Netflix that had its own take on the concept. This short film spoke to the heart of the X-Men's conflict, with Firebase on Netflix being the closest thing to a "new" X-Men series. Likewise, the recently-revealed X-Men '97 release date makes this Netflix special even more important.

What Is Neill Blomkamp's Firebase About?

Firebase on Netflix is set during the last half-decade of the Vietnam War, with a Vietnamese farmer unaffiliated with any warring factions losing his wife to the ongoing conflict. At that moment of unbearable loss, he becomes an entity of pure rage whose grief can alter the fabric of reality, displace time, and subconsciously perform feats of vicious necromancy. Leaving a trail of bloody paranormal events along the Mekong like an amalgam of a Satanic Dr. Manhattan and a subtropical Night King, this individual soon becomes an entity known as the River God.

Netflix's Firebase shows him being hunted by an American soldier, Sergeant Hines, who has seen the River God's handiwork firsthand. The men of his company describe Hines as touched by the divine, a man who can dodge raindrops, blessed with an uncanny ability to instinctively anticipate deathly chaos. Hines doesn't seem to have any idea what he is or even what the River God is, but he is drawn to the latter like a moth to a mushroom cloud. Jacob Palmer, a CIA agent who has been in touch with Hines, tracking his movements and interviewing his men, has some answers.

Palmer invites Hines to an interrogation of the only person alive who can speak to what the River God is capable of, a badly burned young soldier named Corporal Richard Bracken. The corporal describes a trip to the future, half a world away, where he was caught in a shower of blue napalm and deposited back to the present, still burning and in the jungles of Vietnam, surrounded by his dead walking platoon. Palmer dutifully outfits Hines with hyper-advanced weaponry and armor designed to enhance his own luck-fueled abilities and make him immune to reality warping, so he can confront the River God in the Netflix "mutant" show.

How Does Netflix's Firebase Compare To Marvel's X-Men?

Agent Palmer serves as the sagacious guide to this new world of gods and metahumans. As those around him are too frightened to answer the questions that plague them and make sense of the things they cannot explain, Palmer is bemused but somehow maintains his focus. He has clearly been planning and preparing to recruit a special individual for an unimaginable threat in a Professor X type of role, offering guidance and resources. The film clocks in at just under 25 minutes, but the pacing is so precise that the story feels dense without any bulky exposition.

The degradation of the human form in every manner of destruction and monstrous rebirth is heavy-handed and just a shade shy of gratuitous, but paired with a very subtle technique of storytelling. Watching Hines learn the nature of what he's facing and coming to grips with the truth of his own identity is handled with all the real-world shock and acceptance of something unbelievable but tangible. While X-Men shows like Legion did a remarkable job with this same type of narrative stylization at first, most others collide abruptly with unearned character expectations and boilerplate awakenings that lead to costume montages.

Mutants Need Better Attention In The MCU

Daredevil and the Netflix Marvel shows felt grounded, namely because their powers were so subdued compared to the likes of major and expensive Marvel powerhouses such as Hulk and Thor. Mutants — who are varied and diverse individuals capable of optic blasts, mind control, psychokinesis, or weather manipulation — require more negotiation when bartering screen time. This also requires a lot more care when juxtaposed with "normals" who have no concept of how or why any of these truths can be possible. That said, mutants somehow react to them as if it's a small adjustment to their understanding of how the world works.

Shows like Mutant X, a truly beleaguered litigious and narrative enterprise, or Generation X didn't even make an attempt at assimilating the world of before to the world of the super-powered now. Marvel's Runaways and The Gifted, much like the highly praised Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., assume an established world and foray into character development almost immediately, requesting grace and a suspension of disbelief from the audience. The Ms. Marvel series established that Iman Vellani's Kamala Khan is a mutant, but it did this at the series' end and thus had no room to do anything with it. On the other hand, Netflix's "Firebase" takes its time and offers tight, nuanced storytelling and perhaps a template that Marvel's future mutant programming can benefit from. This makes it into Netflix's X-Men during a period when Marvel isn't making its own mutant programming, with the Netflix mutant show standing out even more because of this.

Though there are several elements that classify "Firebase" as a Netflix mutant show, it does notably eschew "superheroics." This makes it a lot closer to many of the previous mutant and X-Men adjacent TV shows. In the case of The Gifted and Legion, they were made in the vein of the Fox X-Men movies, which were far more grounded and realistic compared to other superhero movie properties. Both shows lacked costumes and felt more like pure science fiction thrillers with sociopolitical allegories. On the other hand, the Disney+ Ms. Marvel series was much more lighthearted and breezy, making it much different from those projects. It's the former tone that Netflix's "Firebase" work so well, with the usual tropes of superhero fiction being ignored in order to focus solely on a strong and thematic narrative. Even if Marvel wasn't actually involved, the story's "new mutants" made it into the closest thing to a Netflix X-Men show.