Why I Saw It: This is entirely due to Chloe Grace Moretz being in it.
Cast: Chloe Grace Moretz is, of course, pretty great in this. She is on the short (very short) list of actresses that age who I could see pulling off Carrie White without doing a Sissy Spacek impression. She can pull off the shyness and the rage with aplomb. Julianne Moore plays crazy but I didn't get a feeling of danger from her. Maybe they neuter her with Carrie's telekinesis too early. The actors playing Sue and Tommy are as blandly good as those playing Chris and Billy are blandly evil. Not sure if I can blame the actors on that because Gabriella Wilde has a very few moments that hint at depth. I'd also like to point out here that Judy Greer is always awesome.
Plot: You know the story. Shy girl with an overbearing mother who has some really warped religious views discovers she has telepathy around the same time that bullying happens. Teasing. Pig blood. Massacre. Source material be damned. This movie should've climaxed with the prom, and quite frankly, the prom massacre was a little underwhelming. That probably says more about my blood lust than anything though. My biggest issue was with the means justifying the end. Simply put, I don't feel that Carrie's reaction was justified by what we see happen to her before that in the movie. It's obvious that she isn't popular and the shower scene is unfortunate. Carrie assigns more of the blame for that to her mother though. I'm not sure that we see a character who has been pushed to a breaking point by the time the pig's blood happens. At the end of the day, Carrie is either a protagonist (via seeing more bullying) or the antagonist (via the direction taking less delight in cool ways to kill people and focusing of the horrific nature of what she is doing). The movie isn't served well by trying to make her both.
Elephant in the Room: This is a remake of one of the most famous horror movies of all time. That's the biggest hurdle Carrie had to get over and I don't think it did. Seriously, the prom sequence is one of the most famous, reference, spoofed, etc. in film (or horror at the very least). No one is watching this because they don't know what's going to happen next. Remember when there was that Psycho remake that everyone hated because it was a frame-by-frame recreation? The reason it didn't work had nothing to do with the craft and everything to do with there being nothing new there to justify recreating it. While Carrie isn't quite as literal a remake I don't think it hits the threshold of enough new to justify it. There's a couple plot tweaks but the main difference is that the technology is there to do the telepathy better although they go pretty effects-heavy on this, certainly reaching a point of diminishing returns.
To Sum Things Up:
I certainly wanted to like this more than I did. In a vacuum, where only this movie exists, it is fine. In a world where there is a famous adaptation 30 years before it, I can't stop myself from wondering "do we need another". And, I'm not one of those people that holds originals to be sacred. This year, I enjoyed the violent insanity of the Evil Dead remake although I liked it because it is its own movie. Maybe I'm just writing this while my wave of opinion is still crashing down and a week from not it will level out. Currently though, this is a little disappointing. For any Chloe Grace Moretz fans out there, have no fear, she delivers. It's most of the rest of the movie that gives me pause.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
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