(SIGH) Where to start?
First of all, full disclosure – I hate remakes. I hate the fact all my favorite films from the 1970’s are being given crappy unnecessary updates that do nothing but besmirch the memory of a classic.
The filmmakers always try and justify it by saying they are giving the material a “modern take” or “going back to the source material” and being more “faithful”. It’s all bullshit. It’s just a bunch of PR gobbledygook meant to disguise the studio’s lazy liquidation of yet another catlogue title that pre-sells opening weekend. They have to deflect the charge they’re just being greedy (ding-ding-ding!), so they come up with all these reasons why there should be a new version of a story that was told perfectly the first time.
In this case, the director Kimberly Pearce (Boys Don’t Cry) and her star, Chloe Grace Moretz, talked about how it was going to be a “grittier”, “more realistic” version of the story.
Nevermind whether that is even desirable for a deliberately gothic tale like Carrie, when I read their passion for the project I decided to keep an open mind. Maybe this would be the exception to the trend. Maybe they would create something so genuinely fresh that it could stand alongside the Brian DePalma masterpiece, each complementing the other. After all, it can be done. Howard Hawks’ and John Carpenter’s versions of The Thing being the most commonly used example.
So, I ask you…
Does that trailer look “fresh” to you?
Of course not.
It looks like every other bland American-made horror movie of the last ten years – replacing the creepy atmosphere and emotional power, even the morbid sense of humor, of the 1976 film with a ton of shiny new CGI effects. However spectacular, they will no doubt be as weightless and unaffecting as most effects are to our jaded eyes these days. Moretz, a good actress, looks badly miscast and unconvincing. She is too young, too pretty and too “normal” to be playing a social misfit like Carrie White. She could easily be playing one of the girls torturing her. That is, if those girls didn’t look a good three years older than her.
This isn’t so much a bad trailer, as it is a trailer that reveals a bad movie.
(If I turn out to be wrong, expect a sincere mea culpa. Just don’t hold your breath.)
The sad thing is that the studio will get their big opening weekend and the film could end up being a big hit – simply, as they calculated, based on the familiarity of a well-known story.
So the studio was right again…
And the general quality of movies gets a little more pig blood poured over it.