R, 100 minutes
Starring: Chloë GraceMortez, Julianne Moore, Gabriella Wilde
2/5 Stars
Most people know the story of Carrie White by now. Carrie (Mortez) is a senior in high school and is mercilessly bullied at school while at home she is forced to remedy for all her sins she’s committed with her over bearing, extremely religious mother Margaret (Moore). After a mortifying incident in the girl’s locker room, Carrie discovers that she has telekinesis powers, the ability to move objects with her mind (even though the movie gives her some extra random powers such as the ability to smelt metal). Once she realizes these powers she has, she plans to turn the tables on all who have tortured her.
Carrie isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just incredibly unoriginal. Having been a fan of the Stephen King novel and the original Sissy Spacek film from 1974, I was excited to see what new things this adaption could bring. With the advent of social networking posing as another form of bullying for the poor Carrie White, this could have set a perfect example for the need to better advice teens and children about what they say over the web and how it can affect other people in a negative fashion. But no, opportunity wasted. Carrie felt that it was struggling to be an absolute remake of the original film while taking place in modern day which made for confusion, jumbled viewing. Added onto that, in this day an age could an eighteen year old girl not figure out somwhere what a mentstral cycle was, even if she’s as socially naive and awkward as Carrie White.
Mortez does nothing to bring a unique, pain stricken take on the teenager and tries to do a bad impression of a girl in agony when it feels like most of the time she’s ready to burst out laughing. Moore does the best she can do with what she’s given, but it isn’t much, but Margaret White doesn’t seem all that terrifying and is more awkwardly comical. The script is bland, the character development is too forced and clichéd and the only things that are really horrifying are the overabundance of bad CGI that looks like it belongs in a claymation Ray Harryhousen movie like Jason and the Argonauts, and the terrible editing with too many cuts taking away from the story exposes amateur film making.
Carrie never needed to be remade, but this could have been a glorious modern take incorporating possibly more storylines from the novel or bringing in present technology and new, twisted forms of torture for the poor Carrie White, but Carrie itself has trouble creating a unique film while paying homage to the original. What the audience is left with is a mess of a film with semi decent acting in a sloppy production. Carrie is dissapointingly flawed and no sorce of special mind powers can fix it.
