Movie Review: Carrie (2013)

A teenage girl, sheltered her whole life by her religious mother, struggles to fit in among hateful teenagers at her high school as she also begins to discover she has the ability to move things with her mind. Things seem to take a turn for the better when the popular guy in school asks her to prom. Let's be honest, you probably already know the whole story. This film is a remake of one of the most well known movies of the last 30 years but is this update worth seeing? Keep reading to find out.
The Good

A highlight of this version of Carrie has to be Julianne Moore who plays Carrie's extremely disturbed mother. Moore has never really lived up to her reputation, in my opinion, but with Carrie she delves headfirst into creepy and I was impressed. Her character is basically the town nutjob who believes everyone is going to hell. The depictions of abuse toward her daughter are highly disturbing and Moore's performance sells them completely. Unfortunately, the high quality of Julianne Moore's performance draws a lot of attention to one of the biggest problems of the film.

The Bad

Chloe Moretz is fast becoming a big name in Hollywood and rightly so. Her performances are usually worthy of that kind of attention. In Carrie, however, she fails to bring anything to the roll other than intense stares during the films CGI heavy climax. Carrie played the roll no better or worse than most girls that could have been cast. Its hard to measure up to the original film's Sissy Spacek, but I think the film makers could have found someone better than this.

One of my biggest problems with Carrie, both the old and new versions, is that the whole movie is leading up to one scene that contains pretty much all of the film's action. Mybhope for the remake was that it might deviate from this formula by adding in some additional action. Instead, they pretty much stuck with the same formula which leaves the audience bored and just wanting to get on with it.

The original Carrie was groundbreaking in its day and still sticks in many people's minds as a classic horror film. The remake fails to recapture that feeling and to break any new ground of its own and ultimately I'll try to forget it ever happened. At least we still have the ororiginal