Saturday, October 26, 2013

'Carrie' A Review

Carrie is a supernatural thriller, a remake of the 1976 classic of the same name, based on the novel by Stephen King. Carrie a sheltered, religious, awkward teen gets her first period in the women's locker room and is ridiculed by her classmates. This event awakens Carrie's latent telekinesis which sets the plot and impending crisis in motion. 

The movie falls flat almost from the get go. What appears to be a scene by scene remake captures none of the terror or camp of the original, and loses most of the sympathy inherent in the story because of its incredible dullness. There is nothing new or fresh about this incarnation of Carrie, which begs the question- why? Presumably the answer, like the majority of remakes, is monetary. The studios bank on a reliable story as well as a new generation being unfamiliar with the source material.

The casting of Chloe Grace Moretz is in appropriate. When the movie was shot she was fifteen, a good decade younger than the actors playing her classmates, three years younger than the eighteen of Carrie White. Maybe because of her natural confidence she is unable to play "awkward" and "outcast" it simply doesn't read, it's obvious contrived. In scenes with her mother she's entirely too poised, too self assured, to courageous. She is not Carrie, she's who Carrie White wishes she could be and Moretz can't cover that up. Julianne Moore as Margaret White pales in comparison to the shadow cast by Piper Laurie and seems lost from beginning to end.

The movie culminates in a perfect storm of terrible CGI and Moretz conducting the carnage with moves lifted straight from Marvel's tired ceaseless superhero movie machine.

Don't See It.

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