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Horror Remakes really aren't really as tricky as everyone thinks they are. You can take
an old horror classic and update it for modern times and still have a satisfying end product.
Evil Dead and Fright Night both had remakes that took the backbone of their story and
made a satisfying modern version of them. But that's it isn't it. You have to only take
the essence of what came before and fill in the blanks yourself. This movie realises that
it will be called out on all of the times it finds itself emulating the Brian De Palma
original too much and so to combat this, instead of adding anything particularly new, they
go straight back to trying to do what the 2002 movie did and stay more faithful to the
book. My biggest problem with this movie, and there
are many problems I have with this movie, is that all of my thoughts could be summarised
with the sentence; "I've seen this before". I know Carrie's story because I read the book
and watched three movies of it in the span of less than a month and I understand that
there are people that have never even heard of Carrie and what her story is about, but
when you adapt a story, you have to cater to both sides by taking the original story
and presenting it in a new way. Brian De Palma's shadow looms over this movie so vigorously.
If I pretended that this was the only adaptation of Carrie then yes, I would certainly say
that it's a great movie. The cast, the directing, the writing are all great. The CGI is pretty
terrible, but that's not the point. The problem is that, despite being good, everything I
just mentioned is cribbing off De Palma so much. Why should these people get points for
just taking what Brian De Palma did back in the 70s and slightly changing it.
The cast are functional with Chloe Moretz as the stand-out, but that raises another
issue. The whole premise of the film relies on the idea that we would look at Carrie as
some kind of social pariah that we would want to ignore and not ask out to the prom. You
can put her in all of the flannel shirts and overalls you want and have her hunch over
for hours on end, I would still want to ask her out. Moretz is gorgeous and an extremely
talented actress, but she has been miscast and it hurts this film.
My disappointment had peaked at the prom scene. The first Carrie movie was visually interesting
with the use of split-screen and the saturated colours and the 2002 one was just laughable,
but this one presented the audience with some brutal and unnerving imagery because there's
that knowledge at the back of your head that these are relatable teenagers getting brutally
murdered. The problem is that this is only done for a few minutes because afterwards
the deaths look like something right out of Final Destination and they become so impersonal.
Maybe they should have cut out all of the stupid, 'Carrie learns about her powers like
she's in a superhero movie scenes' to make more time and leave more budget in order to
make for a more powerful prom scene. They even kept in the stupid "Creepy Carrie, Creepy
Carrie" scene. Why? It served no purpose back then and it doesn't now.
The only thing that seemed original was the score. Marco Beltrami is apparently a lacklustre
composer, I don't know, as I haven't paid much attention to his scores, but with Carrie
he did a fantastic job, especially after the prom scene where he plays these thrashing
loud chords. Props to him for not trying to redo what Pino Donaggio did back in 1976.
I guess that, because this is a remake in 2013 being produced and distributed theatrically
with a decent budget and great people in front of and behind the camera, I cannot accept
that they simply just retold the original story beat-for-beat and I find the excuse
of 'I won't go and watch an old movie' pretty pathetic. This movie is functional, but as
to whether it's necessary or not, the answer is a simple 'no'.