The 1974 Stephen King novel, Carrie managed to avoid the usual spiraling silliness of his film adaptations and actually got a pretty good film out of it in 1976. With a depressing atmosphere, haunting soundtrack, grizzly acting and one heck of a memorable ending, Carrie told the story of a bullied girl with powers and turned it into a film that no one would ever forget about through memorable imagery, performances and even scares. In 2011, representatives from MGM and Screen Gems announced that they would be making a remake in 2013, even though King himself specifically stated that he saw no reason for its existence. When this specific remake was brought out in 2013, the reception was not very pleasant, with many stating outright that it was ‘’unnecessary’’ and brought nothing new to the table that the book or the film hadn’t already showcased.  To go from something so striking and memorable to something so pointless and unmemorable is a sign that this wasn’t a well-thought out or executed plan. A teenage girl named Carrie White (played by Chloe Grace Moretz) despite not containing a single quality about herself that would make her the subject of mockery, is seriously bullied, and harassed by fellow classmates at her school, mainly her longtime bully, Chris Hargensen (played by Portia Doubleday). Aside from the school’s physical education teacher, Mrs Desjardin (played by Judy Greer), Carrie finds no relief from her torment due to living with her dangerously religious mother Margaret (played by Julianne Moore), who sees Carrie as very sinful. On the eve of the senior prom, Carrie discovers that she has telekinetic powers that both interest and frighten her. When she is asked to the prom by popular boy Tommy Ross (played by Ansel Elgort) after he was persuaded to be his actual girlfriend, Sue Snell (played by Gabriella Wilde) who felt guilty taking part in Carrie’s bullying, she finally seems to have gotten her first shred of happiness. However, after a cruel prank gone wrong, Carrie’s power explodes and unleashes within her a rage that will no doubt cause havoc to those who wronged her for so long. Instead of updating or re-imagining the story of Carrie in a new time period or style, the film plays it way too safe and results in the film leaving nothing of worth and coming across as truly pointless. That along with awkward acting, unfitting effects, and a real disconnect from the original source material while also strangely being too faithful, this is a completely pointless remake.

The original Carrie was very good at mixing the supernatural elements in with a semi-realistic environment. The telekinetic powers as well as the overall atmosphere and scenery of the film were used as strong symbolism for sexual development and the growth from adolescent to adulthood, which only heightened the suppressed tension from all the characters and how erratically awful a lot of them could be. The story built up enough hardships and turmoil for the main character that when the final prank is pulled, the audience feels genuinely upset to see all the horrors she is put through and for what she has become because of it. But with its heavy 70s aesthetic and tone, there’s room to update the story and at first this seems to be what the film is doing by setting it in a different time to show the differences in school bullying, and at first portraying the teenagers as real people and not the extreme levels of awful in the original, it seemed to be going in the right direction. It also seemed like a smart idea to get Kimberly Pierce, who made the academy award winning film Boys Don’t Cry, as the director, as she had previously showcased her ability to show the true horrors of teenage bullying, so this seemed like a solid starting point. However, as the film progresses, it shows that it’s not going to try anything different and instead sticks a little too close to the book in a very literal sense, going beat for beat from the original story (even including the more extreme and crazy elements like a meteor shower during the climax). The original script was written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who was a Marvel comics writer who had mainly worked on projects from TV like episodes of Glee, and Big Love, and plays as he was hired for his work on the controversial musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Regardless, the film went through re-shoots and the script was rewritten by Lawrence D. Cohen, who wrote the original film. This paints a clear picture of why the film is simultaneously too separate but also too similar to the original story, and now feeling even more out of place because this specific style and tone doesn’t match King’s mood. King works in extremes even in realistic elements and his environment reflects that so people can accept them as such, but by creating a world that feels more real, these extremes that are taken by the bullies and others in this world don’t feel as logical and feel much more out of place. The change in time period doesn’t enhance or update the story, rather it removes a period-specific lens the story took advantage of and makes it less fitting and even more ridiculous.

The characters are largely the same from the original except now having just a few hints of something different sprinkled within. Much like the story, the characters feel like they’re trying to be more fleshed out than their book counterparts and with this modern setting and atmosphere, something could’ve been done to change them to fit a more contemporary environment, but the restrictions the film sets for itself by sticking note-for-note to the source material prevents that from happening. Carrie feels largely the same except now, things are more questionable are her situation like why she would ever be bullied and the reasoning for her telekinetic powers, which now seem even more pointless and unexplained than in the original. Chloe Grace Moretz is a mixed bag in the leading role, as while she’s way too normal looking and well-adjusted to play Carrie (she looks like she would be a popular girl easily) and she doesn’t really seem to change in any way once she goes crazy so it doesn’t feel like that drastic a character shift once she goes psycho, but the overall performance is passable enough and she has proven to be a talented actress elsewhere, so it just feels like she’s misguided and not being led well by the writing or directing. Most of the other cast members feel like that too, aimlessly trying to make something work, but not being given anything solid to go with. Julianne Moore is a good choice for Carrie’s mother, and she can be chilling effective when she gets a good role, yet she feels really lost and generic in her delivery here and doesn’t leave anyway near a strong enough impact for such an integral character, Gabriella Wilde and Portia Doubleday are sadly not very good actresses, so most of their scenes fall pretty hard, Judy Greer is also surprisingly poor despite also usually being pretty funny and talented, and every other performer either feels strangely cartoonish and or just out of place.  The original’s acting was very loud and sometimes crazy yet was matched with this harsh brutal nature that made it feel real, whereas this just comes across like any standard horror flick with an awkward touch.

The effects for the film are wrong for a different reason than people would expect. They honestly don’t look too bad and even when they don’t look real, there is an element of coolness that could work okay with this story, but that point alone draws to the issue; they don’t work for something that’s trying to be scary. In the original, the prom massacre is easily the most memorable part of the movie and while some of the elements like the split screen could look a bit silly nowadays, it did a perfect job at building it up and the results were brutal and haunting. In this version, it doesn’t feel like a punished girl pushed to her limits enacting an almost ghostly level of vengeance, it feels like a superhero vanquishing evildoers in an over-the-top fashion. It feels pretty silly and featuring scenes with her flying and destroying cars by throwing them through the air kinda sucks whatever tension should be felt in the scene. The movie also isn’t scary in the slightest; the original went for a more sorrowfully uncomfortable approach which did great with atmosphere and made everything feel almost demonic near the end, whereas everything in this film from the acting to the effects, to the writing to even the layout of the story fully prevents it from being a horror film. When the final closing shot of the film is a cracked tombstone matched with a rock song, you know that there’s no way that it’s supposed to be a legitimate scary movie.

Carrie is a very well-known film and one that didn’t need to be made again, but if it’s going to be done, it needs to change some things up and bring the story to a new level, which this movie just doesn’t do. This film not only does less than the original in all forms, but it also manages this while changing nothing to make itself relevant, thereby making it a complete wasteful mess of a movie. As a viewing experience, it’s not painfully bad to get through as while the acting is pretty off and the tone is all over the place, it has enough serviceable directing and presentation (outside of a really weird out of nowhere shots near the end of the film) to make it viewable. Ironically even though this story is too obsessed with its original source, if you didn’t know about the story and just removed the name Carrie from it entirely, it would just stand as some forgettable modern horror flick. This movie leaves no impact and is left behind in the long wave of other pointless classic horror remakes. While the original will always be remembered as a great horror film, this one is more likely going to be remembered as a super villain origin story as opposed to a good remake.

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