CARRIE (2002) If you see just one remake this year...don't let this be it! Let it never be said that Brian J. Wright was rooting for this one to fail. I wanted to like this, honestly. The knee-jerk reaction to this TV movie's existence - and yeah, I had it too, at first - was that it's a dumb idea. Surely, the original Carrie is pretty much the only Stephen King adaptation which everybody liked (mmm, maybe The Dead Zone excepted). How hard could it have been remake something that didn't work the first time? It's not like there isn't a lot to choose from. But it occurred to me that movies which feature prom scenes are the ones that are going to age the least gracefully. Lots of other 1976 movies have survived the past 26 years relatively unscathed. But it doesn't get much more 1976 than Brian De Palma's Carrie. Maybe this is one of those movies that has to be remade every generation or so. Not just because of its self-dating nature, but because it's just one of those stories that each generation should have at least some familiarity with, particularly in a post-Columbine world. But the first shot in this movie is of meteors falling from the sky. "Augh!" I cried out. Well, something like that. I just knew, this show was gonna explain Carrie's powers with those meteors. But it didn't. I'll give it that. Oh, I don't understand what the meteors were all about - I guess Carrie must've drawn them down from the sky in a tantrum, but from where? Are meteors just kinda hovering in geosynchronous orbit over Maine? Or maybe they're moon rocks. I guess we're lucky she didn't pull down the whole moon. The script tells the story in flashback style, as a police detective David Keith questions various teens about what happened that dreadful night when the prom exploded. So how is it we also keep getting shown scenes they weren't present for and could not have witnessed? For that matter, this investigation goes nowhere - we never find out what his conclusions are, or how the hell he's gonna explain a telekinetic rampage to the chief. But otherwise, the story is more or less the same tale of Carrie with which we're familiar. High school student Carrie White (Angela Bettis) is the subject of ridicule and scorn by the rest of her class, for no reason other than that she's different (nobody knows yet that she has telekinetic powers). And, maybe, the religious restrictions placed on her by her tyrannical mother (Patricia Clarkson, in the Piper Laurie role), who, for example, pulls her out of biology class on the day they study evolution. Little help from the faculty; the gym teacher is sympathetic and even puts her job on the line to help, but the principal calls Carrie "whatsername", "Carrie Wright", and "Cassie" (twice) all in the same scene. Following a couple of exceptionally cruel episodes, one classmate (Kandyse McClure) takes pity on her and sets her up with her boyfriend (Tobias Mehler) on what none of them know is doomed to be the worst prom date, ever. Casting, beyond the lead, is mostly bad. In an age where even supposedly ugly characters are played by models, Bettis (who's like 27 years old) does her role some justice, both in the sharp, awkward-but-interesting angularity of her face, and in the mostly convincing way she's terrified of, well, everything. Still manages to work in a pretty foxy yearbook picture if you ask me, though. Clarkson is neither as frightening or as charismatic as this kind of abusive parent would need to be, and she's even less so once Carrie starts investigating her powers and suddenly stops being intimidated. Take one scene where Carrie uses her power to thrust Mom into the closet in which Carrie herself had so often been banished (hmm...I smell a queer-theory review out there somewhere), semi-apologizing "I love you Mom, I'm sorry! Watch your fingers!" McClure and Mehler are both bland, boring wholesomeness, while the villain girls are all conventionally pretty in the way that high-school students are all portrayed in the movies these days, which for me, just gives them that extra boo-hiss factor. The bullies are all unredeemingly vile, with no apparent motivation for their cruelty beyond parental neglect or their own sour temperament. In the place of all those cute pop culture references, I would've liked for the script by Bryan Fuller to at least skim the surface of the questions a lot of us have asked ourselves about bullying in the last three years (though the observation that anything that was done in a Freddie Prinze Jr. movie can't be a good idea is an accurate if unsurprising one). It's been a long time since I read this book (grade ten), so I don't recall exactly where this movie diverges from it, but one interesting aspect of this movie I don't recall from the book or Brian De Palma's movie is that here, Carrie actively investigates and works on her developing powers, which brings her mother's reign of terror to an abrupt end, though she's still extremely shy and awkward around other teens. I've always believed that the pigs' blood at the climax was a little too over-the-top, taking a kind of psychopathy beyond what we normally find in malcontent teenagers to believe this kind of "joke" would be found funny (instead of just revolting) by anybody. But hey, look how much money that Jackass movie made. Maybe King was ahead of his time. Maybe that's what the story needed to get Carrie to open up that can of Yuri Geller-brand whupass. Here, she doesn't just kill everybody at the prom, she takes out half the town, blowing up a gas station n' everything, while walking home in a trance, which she later has no memory of. I don't want to give away too much about what's changed about the ending, but let me put it this way - it's entirely possible that there is a Carrie TV series in the works, where every week she gets Pushed Too Far. I mentioned the problem of self-dating, inherent for a story like this...well, this movie's going to have more of a problem with it than most, what with all those Ralph Nader and Freddy Prinze Jr. references. The direction by TV veteran David Carson is heavy-handed, and not in a good Brian De Palma way, and the editing and placement of commercials (sure to be less glaring on home video, but why bother?) is lumbering, particularly during the climax which starts and stops like Meshuggah. I don't think there's a single aspect to this movie which completely works. There's a lot of things that ALMOST work, particularly Carrie herself (though she seems handily absolved of all responsibility for her rampage at the end - I say this to whoever makes the next Carrie, let her enjoy it!). I can understand the motive for making this one, but it's been gone about in such a timid, wimpy way, partly because of the inherent constraints of network TV, but mostly because the story and dialogue is pedestrian and shallow. I'll still be first in line when the next stab at adapting Carrie is made in 2028. I'll be the guy saying "I hope it's better than the 2002 version", and everybody else in the line will say "There was a 2002 version?" BACK TO THE C's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE