Brian De Palma’s Carrie was a landmark horror film. It perfectly depicted the awkwardness and cruelty of teenage life with its memorable, Oscar nominated performances and striking visual panache. Several of its jarring images are iconic in film history. As a result, it’s difficult not to carry some bias into a new remake. And while this Carrie features two strong leads and tries gamely, it’s nearly a carbon copy of the original and comes across as unremarkable and unnecessary.
Carrie White (Chloe Grace Moretz) is a cripplingly shy high school student who lives under the wing of Margaret (Julianne Moore), her deeply religious mother. Isolated and relentlessly teased by all her classmates, Carrie begins to discover that she has telekinetic gifts. Things begin to look up when popular student Sue (Gabriella Wilde) feels guilty about treating Carrie poorly and asks her boyfriend to escort the self-conscious outcast to prom. But after other students pull a horrible prank, Carrie lets her powers loose on the tormentors.
So what’s different about this adaptation? Very little. And as a result, it’s difficult not to make comparisons. Original screenwriter Lawrence Cohen is still credited as main scribe and several scenes are played out verbatim from the original script. There is the odd change in dialogue to contemporize conversations (like a Tim Tebow reference), but several sequences from the first two acts are identical. Admittedly, there are a few additional scenes that didn’t exist in the previous incarnation. One features the teenage antagonists uploading their taunts to the internet and there are a couple of scenes with Margaret that attempt to give a little more detail to her character. However, these moments are largely superfluous.
As mentioned previously, the two leads are fine. Grace Moretz certainly looks uncomfortable and convincingly embodies her character’s nervousness and low self esteem. Some of the death scenes during the finale are slightly elongated and extended for graphic effect. Yet the updated and more elaborate CGI effects aren’t always convincing, and the movie isn’t as visually stylish as its inspiration. Beyond a few slow-motion and high angle shots that are cribbed from the original film, the movie looks surprisingly drab. It can’t be written about in detail, but it also feels as if a couple of very minor changes to the last act were made in the name of political correctness.
Carrie isn’t a badly made flick, but it’s no classic and ultimately doesn’t make much of an impact. Had this been the first attempt at adapting the source material, it would be quickly forgotten. Unless you’re completely unfamiliar with the story and aren’t willing to watch anything that wasn’t made in the current millennia, there’s absolutely no reason to check it out. Frankly, interested parties can watch the original on Netflix right now and see the same story more dynamically and effectively told.