TORONTO — Carrie, a remake of the 1976 horror classic based on Stephen King’s novel, is in theatres now.
Filmed last year in Toronto and directed by Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry), it stars Chloë Grace Moretz as the titular telekinetic teen and Julianne Moore as her abusive Bible-thumping mom.
Can Carrie scare up enough ticket sales to bump Gravity into second place at the weekend box office or will it be a bloody failure? Here’s a look at what some critics are saying.
“The new Carrie remake is literally a pallid imitation of the original,” wrote Bruce DeMara in the Toronto Star, who praised the casting of actors who actually look like teenagers to play high school students.
DeMara said Moretz “portrays Carrie with the requisite doe-eyed innocence and awkwardness of adolescence and the stellar Julianne Moore presents us with a compelling portrait of evil — a tormented, self-mutilating woman whose good intentions are so clearly out of step with reality.”
But, he added, “the relationship — so central to the story — between mother and daughter simply doesn’t gel here, robbing the film of one of its essential pillars.”
DeMara described the iconic climax of the story “restrained in all the wrong ways.”
Justin Chang of Variety agreed.
“It’s a disappointing wrap-up to a movie that, at its infrequent best, suggests there’s more than one way to adapt a classic,” he opined.
Chang said the new Carrie “sustains interest as a moody psychological/paranormal drama with a melancholy undertow that at times tilts into genuine pathos” and that Peirce “offers a fresh, intelligent spin on certain key aspects of a largely familiar tale.”
He found Moretz’s performance lacking, though.
“Moretz, though superficially deglammed with a strawberry-blonde mop, is still rather too comely to resemble the pimply, slightly overweight figure described in King’s novel,” Chang wrote, “and her efforts to look downcast and withdrawn strain credulity at first.”
Scott Weinberg of FEARnet disagreed. He said what the movie lacks in original ideas, it makes up for with solid performances.
“Although she’s sure to be compared (and probably unfavorably) to Sissy Spacek’s masterful 1976 turn as Carrie White, the young and lovely Chloe Grace Moretz delivers a simply fantastic performance,” he wrote. “Carrie White is not meant to be an ugly girl who slowly turns pretty; she’s meant to be a pretty girl who is terrified of becoming a woman, and Ms. Moretz does a wonderful job of balancing earnest innocence and, as the film progresses, some truly dark moments.”
In the Brighton-Pittsford Post, Ed Symkus wondered: “Why remake a movie without adding anything new or improved?”
Claudia Puig of USA Today called the new version “a purely cosmetic revamp” and “a bland retread.”
She wrote: “It’s not enough to merely update the era and add smartphones into the mix. Peirce should have taken either a more comic tone or a more somber one, exploring social isolation and assessing the damaging influences of school bullies and a mother who locks her daughter in a closet to repent.”
At Shock till You Drop, Ryan Turek described Carrie as “a totally harmless remake.”
“Where Carrie staggers,” he wrote, “is in its failure to bring anything new to the film’s themes. Sure, it updates the level of bullying.
“Where Carrie also misses the mark is in its finale. The final moments are awfully preachy, as if to hammer home a point we’ve already reached well before Carrie’s visit to the prom.”
Macleans critic Brian D. Johnson felt the new Carrie was too much like the first.
“Entire scenes, shots and lines of dialogue are recycled from the original. And the structure remains completely intact,” wrote Johnson. “It’s as if Peirce and her screenwriters wanted to rehabilitate a classic and perform some cosmetic surgery, but were scared to mess with the bones of a story that worked so well in the first place.
“But by taking a safe, piecemeal approach—and treating the original a sacred text rather than completely reinventing it—the result at times seems weirdly anachronistic.”
At Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman made a similar observation.
Gleiberman wasn’t thrilled with how the director chose to present the familiar prom scene.
“In the original Carrie, Spacek’s character seemed to be channeling something creepy and larger-than-life — maybe it was even the underworld,” he said. “But now we’re a lot more accustomed to seeing movie characters mold their destiny through special effects, and since Peirce films the climax in a rather depersonalized, shoot-the-works way, Carrie comes close to seeming like an especially alienated member of the X-Men team.
“She blows stuff up real good, in a way that would make the devil — or Bruce Willis — proud.”
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