October 5th: Carrie 2013

Remakes aren't necessarily a bad thing. I never feel the anger others do when I hear a favorite movie of mine is getting a new telling. This telling of Carrie is only really effective when it's slavishly copying the original. The changed bits add nothing at their best, and stick out obnoxiously at their worst.

The movie opens with a POV shot creeping through the house. It lingers on iconic images and tableaus from the original Carrie. This will unfortunately be one of the most subtle reminders of the first movie. After the credits, the first scene at school is the girls' gym class playing volleyball yet again. But the slight twist is that it's water volleyball. Right here, it might seem like they're going for a different, more visually interesting inciting incident. But no, we're immediately to the locker room, and the familiar shower. Halfway through the movie, I realized it would be impossible to count up all of the moments that are the exact lines and/or shots from the original.

There's way too much flashy CGI stuff that doesn't really add anything more to the story. In one of the early scenes practicing her powers, Carrie levitates her bed and several books. Chloe Grace Moretz actually does a great job showing the experimentation, wonder, joy, and fear at exploring her powers (aka new found sexuality) in these scenes. But the focus seems much more on the pretty shiny things flying around the screen than the character moment.

The most egregious less is more example is the climatic rampage. It becomes much larger, more elaborate, and sadistic for really no reason at all. You get the sense the remake is trying to have its cake and eat it too. In this version, Carrie spares her teacher and saves Sue. But then she just gruesomely tortures everyone that she does kill. Poor Chris and John Travolta just get their car flipped and immediately exploded in 1976. Here? The boyfriend gets his head scrambled by the steering wheel after Carrie stops the car faster than a brick wall. Then Chris is flung to a gas station, and has her head slowly pulled through the cracking windshield. Carrie walks away with her bleeding to death, then blows up the gas station as an afterthought, like an action star.

The base story of Carrie is still a good one. This remake keeps close enough to the original to keep it from being too bad. But it doesn't really take enough chances to stand out. In the end, it keeps the general plot of the original, but unfortunately has none of its unique style or vision. It's also a weird commentary on the changing morality in movies that nearly 40 years later, we're way more scared of seeing the female body naked than seeing a female body crushed and spewing blood under a trampling mob.