Carrie (2013) [Blu-ray]
Drama | Horror

Tagline: You will know her name

You will know her name Chloe Grace Moretz and Oscar nominee Julianne Moore star in this exhilarating reimagining of Stephen King's iconic best seller. After merciless taunting from classmates and abuse at the hand of her religious fanatic mother (Moore), Carrie's (Mortez) anger - and her telekinetic powers - are unleashed. And when a prom prank goes horribly wrong, events spiral out of control until the terrifying conclusion of this powerful, pulse-quickening horror story.

Storyline: A reimagining of the classic horror tale about Carrie White (Chloë Grace Moretz), a shy girl outcast by her peers and sheltered by her deeply religious mother (Julianne Moore), who unleashes telekinetic terror on her small town after being pushed too far at her senior prom. Based on the best-selling novel by Stephen King, Carrie is directed by Kimberly Peirce with a screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. Written by Sony Pictures Entertainment

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Michael Reuben on January 12, 2014 -- Interviewed about the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, actor Jackie Earle Haley was asked why anyone would want to step into the shoes of Robert Englander in the iconic role of Freddy Krueger. Haley gave an interesting answer. He pointed out that the studio was going to remake the film whether or not he took the role. Why not see what he could do with it?

Director Kimberly Peirce must have thought something similar when MGM and Screen Gems offered her their remake of Brian De Palma's 1976 classic Carrie . Even Stephen King, who isn't known for his fondness of film adaptations of his novels, admired De Palma's film and saw little reason to redo it. "The real question is why, when the original was so good? I mean, not Casablanca, or anything, but a really good horror-suspense film, much better than the book." In fairness, King did say he'd be interested in what David Lynch or David Cronenberg might make of the story.

But it was Peirce who got the assignment, and she dutifully dug into King's novel, looking for elements that might allow Carrie to be reinvented for a later era. So in Peirce's version, we get cyberbullying, a far more sympathetic—even pathetic—portrayal of Carrie's mother, Margaret White, and a more assertive Carrie who quickly moves from being a passive victim to a predator bent on revenge. Throughout the extras, Peirce refers to the film as a "superhero origin story".

What Peirce failed to accomplish, though (and what De Palma achieved in spades), is to weave the luxuriant spell of attraction and repulsion that is the distinctive quality of great horror. Her film hits all the right beats, contains solid performances and has effects of which De Palma could only have dreamed in 1976, but it never gets under the viewer's skin.

Carrie White (Chloë Grace Moretz) is that kid at school: the shy one who stands apart, doesn't fit in and is an easy target for abuse. Most such unfortunates never get even, but what if one of them had hidden powers? That premise was an essential element in the 2008 Swedish film Let the Right One In (remade in 2010 as Let Me In, also starring Moretz), and it's key to Carrie's plot, in which a bullied nobody is revealed as a telekinetic superbeing who can kill with a thought. Carrie doesn't know this about herself when the film opens, because her powers don't mature until puberty, which hits with a vengeance when she gets her first period during a locker room shower after gym class.

Carrie thinks she's dying when the blood begins to flow, because her deeply disturbed mother, Margaret (Julianne Moore), has withheld from her daughter all knowledge about sex and womanhood in a futile attempt to prevent Carrie from growing up. Margaret could easily be dismissed as a religious nut, but Peirce and Moore go out of their way to show her as a borderline psychotic so possessed by terror that she constantly engages in self-injury to control her fear. Her "religion" is part Christianity, part self-invented sexual obsession. In De Palma's film, Piper Laurie transformed this character into a terrifying grotesque, but Moore locates the pathos and the sorrow in Margaret White. She might even have made Margaret sympathetic—in a different movie.

Carrie screams for help in the locker room, and her classmates mercilessly mock her ignorance and pelt her with tampons, until the gym teacher, Ms. Desjardin (Judy Greer), comes to her rescue. The leaders of the she-wolf pack are best friends Sue Snell (Gabriella Wilde) and Chris Hargensen (Portia Doubleday), whose very different reactions to the incident will lead to disaster. Sue regrets her treatment of Carrie and tries to make amends, while Chris doubles down on her hatred and seeks to treat Carrie even more cruelly. The respective efforts of the (now former) best friends reach their conclusion at the school prom, where Chris and her boyfriend Billy Nolan (Alex Russell) humiliate Carrie in front of the whole school, little suspecting that the girl they thought was a wispy nobody has been practicing her new-found skills at moving objects, starting fires and self-levitation.

This is perhaps the most dramatic difference between Peirce's vision of Carrie and De Palma's. In De Palma's film, Sissy Spacek portrayed Carrie as a dreamer lost in her own thoughts, even when she began to realize the extent of her capabilities. Her telekinetic effects often seemed to surprise her, as if she didn't expect her daydreams to become reality. Moretz's Carrie, by contrast, begins experimenting with her powers as soon as she discovers them. By the time she's reached the prom, she has already used them to emancipate herself from her mother, and when she takes her revenge on the school, she does so deliberately, pointedly and with focus. In the final reckoning with Margaret, Spacek's Carrie reacted spontaneously and then was shocked at the outcome, but Moretz's Carrie makes a deliberate choice. It's as if Peirce couldn't envision a passive heroine after decades of butt-kicking female action stars and plucky girl survivors in horror films.

The problem is that a "strong" Carrie becomes just another entry in a long line of generic lead characters. De Palma's and Spacek's Carrie was memorable precisely because there was never anything strong about her; unlike Peirce, they weren't making a superhero origin story. In Peirce's film, Carrie's heroism extends all the way to the end, in ways I will leave for the viewer to discover. As for the "too shocking for theaters" alternate ending included on the Blu-ray, let's just say that the only thing shocking about it is how bad it is. Most deletions belong on the cutting room floor, and this was one of them.

Obvious care and craftsmanship went into the new Carrie, but I suspect that anyone familiar with the original will watch it ticking off the similarities and differences between it and De Palma's version rather than being drawn into the world of the film. Viewers new to the story may be entertained, but I suspect they may wonder what all the fuss was about. The Blu-ray satisfies on a technical level, but what MGM and Fox should really be working on is a remaster of De Palma's original. That would be recommended. This one is up to you.

[CSW] -3.1- It is a remake of a classic film at its finest but I was sort of expecting a deeper understanding of Carry in this remake. This is almost a shot-by-shot remake of the original film, and in that regard it is fine. It is well acted, well executed, and very good looking but the potential to really tell the story of Carrie was there and they didn't jump at the chance, thus making this a good film but not a great film. If you liked the original you will like this one but I doubt that you will love it more than the original.
[V4.5-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box motion codes were available at the time of this rental although they are available now.


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