A newly released Carrie featurette from the upcoming reboot has emerged, which includes commentary from Chloe Grace Moretz, Julianne Moore, Judy Greer, and director Kimberly Peirce. For those of us who have already seen the trailer, the new Carrie featurette doesn’t add much, except for reaffirmation that Stephen King’s paranormal tale of adolescent angst is engaging and clever enough to still resonate across generations and decades.
The film is scheduled to be released close to Halloween, on Oct. 18, happily! But Carrie was original supposed to come out last March… usually a bad sign.
What to say about the new reboot of Carrie? First of all, the movie suffers a serious problem before it’s even released, something Peirce alludes to with, “We’re all watching it, thinking, don’t go to the prom…”
Everybody already knows what happens! Even for those who haven’t read the book (and it was his truly terrifying debut that first made Stephen King a house-hold name), Brian de Palma’s 1976 adaptation is one of the most popular and recognizable horror films of all time. No doubt it was a challenge to add more substantive aspects to the story.
Screenwriter Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has written for Glee and Big Love, and Peirce directed the critically-acclaimed Boys’ Don’t Cry. That being said, for those of us who have read the book, we know that many awesome scenes were left out of the original movie. Without giving away too many spoilers, Carrie’s final freak-out doesn’t just destroy prom; in the grand echelon of Stephen King tales, the fate of entire town is at stake.
Now that would be something I’d like to see. But the other problem is that in both the book and De Palma’s version, Carrie is a hopelessly ugly and awkward figure perpetually ostracized by a popular caste of jerk high school students. Meek and mousy Sissy Spacek was a perfect casting choice in 1976, but it’s a stretch to imagine one of Hollywood’s most beautiful and promising young actresses (Chloe Grace Moretz) filling the shoes of Carrie White.
As for Julianne Moore, few other actress can embody hysteria convincingly enough to play Carrie’s insane mother. Her role alone is enough to lure this writer to the theaters. And Judy Greer as the benevolent Ms. Desjardin? Can’t really go wrong with anything the excellent Greer does.
Despite some shaky foundations. I’m excited for this film, and I hope it lives up to its promise. Someone once wrote that Carrie is a modern-day fairy-tale gone awry in a gruesome age where fairy-tales no longer come true. This is an apt description, and that classic quality of Carrie is enough to allow it to be re-made over and over, as long as there’s an audience familiar with its universal themes of isolation, familial destruction, and revenge.
SOURCE: Screen Rant
