2013 Carrie movie that brings the novel by Stephen King to life.

Carrie movie 2013 based off the 1973 novel by Stephen King and the 1976 film (and a little mix of both), is the remake that attempts to retell the horror classic with a modernized fashion. This new adaptation does little to be any original from its original source and it doesn’t live up to its expectations having been faltered by its messy pacing, weak characterization, and despite the impressive visuals that we were waiting for, Carrie (2013) doesn’t live up to its original or give an amazing movie adaptation of its source novel even if it gives an impressive effort.

What was so magical about the 1976 original was how director De Palma was able to tell a great horror story in just an hour and a half by beautiful pacing and simplicity. The same qualities are attempted to be imitated here, but both fail greatly. The pacing of the film isn’t necessarily fast, but it is rushed. You don’t ever get deep into a specific scene and feel what Stephen King wanted his audience to feel. Instead we keep flying to the next scene and to the next until we arrive at the ending, which is just mildly short of perfect. It’s a great improvement over the original as for one, the screen wasn’t divided in two scenes, the visuals of this decade really brought this significant scene from the book to life without being so unsatisfactory with the cheap special effects from the original, and we saw a little bit more this time around as the violence was amped up a couple thousand notches with its visual brutality. This movie ending is enough to trick most moviegoers into making them think it was such a beautiful movie, but we can’t forget about how the beginning and middle were so choppily edited and ironically, its fast pace ended up making the first 2/3 of the movie quite a tad boring because we were never quite too interested in what we weren’t informed much of.
This weak pacing killed the characterization of the film, the key element that made the book and movie so entertaining. Even if the 1976 version had terrible visuals—if any at all—it still drew the audience in throughout the whole movie by making us so drawn into the characters’ lives and feelings; the same cannot be said here. Some characters were not emphasized much upon and/or were poorly casted.
Chloe Grace Moretz gave a fine performance as did Julianne Moore (they were still talented even if the actresses in the classic were both nominated for an Academy Award for the same roles), but the rest of the cast made this movie feel too much as a 90210 spinoff, as did some scenes that were added in which never really did contribute to this film in much of a positive way.

Making a movie off a book is never as easy as it seems. The movie’s job is to leave some scenes from the book, include some from the book and know how to elaborate it within the book. A movie remake’s job is to know what elements from the original to use and what to exclude. Sadly, even if this recent adaptation perfectly illustrated the most important scene from the book that the original classic did not, it was still let down by not following the rules of what ANY MOVIE in general should do: Write a strong script with solid characters and talented actors to fill in these roles. If we want THE CARRIE MOVIE that brings Stephen King’s book to life, it would need to be a mix of both the films, by offering the nearly perfect storytelling and characterization from the original, which is pretty much 90% of what makes up a good movie, and quite simply, the visuals from the original, which make up the mere remaining 10% of a good movie, a simple element that over half the movies in this century possess.
MY GRADE: 68%- While giving us a much more satisfactory ending than the original by promising the fans of the book what they wanted, this film still lets us down by its weak pacing, choppy editing, awful characterization, and unsatisfactory casting.