- Joined
- Feb 19, 2018
Okay, speaking of bad adaptions or reboots, I recently saw that new Firestarter remake with Zak Efron. Its flaming hot garbage that not only fails to be a decent adaptation of the book, but fails to be a decent movie either. It makes no internal sense, looks like shit, and is infuriatingly nonsensical.
The plot of the book is that the government research agency, The Shop, is doing experiments with psychic-power inducing hallucinogens, which don't go well. 10 out of 12 college student volunteers die, but the two survivors bond over the experience, marry, and bear a child. Oh, and ever since getting injected, those two get mild psychic powers and their baby is a very powerful psychic, a pyromancer. Eventually the government freaks out, kills the mom, and sends dad and 8-year old Charlene 'Charlie' on the run. After a year of being fugitives, including cool scenes at an airport and the farm of a kindly Irv Mander they are eventually caught by the really weird agent John Rainbird, who is obsessed with knowing Charlie 'intimately' (by killing her) to take her power into the afterlife. At the Shop's facility, the dad is drugged and thought harmless, while Charlie is manipulated by Rainbird into demonstrating her power for the science tests. Eventually her dad (Andy) overcomes the drugs and tries to escape with Charlie, ending in a big firestorm.
The 1984 movie is a good adaptation and all around decent film. It follows the plot of the book pretty closely, with a few changes here and there to deal with the reality of film versus text - a few characters are merged, some scenes are extended, but it sticks to the formula. Which is good, because Stephen King, even while coked out of his mind, understands narrative structure. The special effects are fine enough, it isn't difficult to light stuff on fire or do fire stunts (and thankfully we get a lot of stuntmen on fire, its great), with more than adequate Italian-influenced and dramatic cinematography, directed by Mark Lester (Commando). It also stars a young Drew Barrymore alongside David Keith (as Andy, her dad) and Heather Locklear (as Vicki, her mom) - and this casting, to me, was key. The heart of the story, which the 2022 remake completely misses, is about the connection between parents and their children, specifically between Andy and Charlie.
A father's love and devotion is the driving force of both the novel and 1984 movie, and it only works because Barrymore and Keith particularly had extremely good chemistry and are so believable.
The recent remake completely fucks this emotional core of the story, absolutely and completely. First of all they up-age Charlie from 8 to 12, so instead of being adorable the actress is adolescent and bitchy, secondly the film spends a LOT of time with Vicki alive so they can build this really messed up dynamic that was NOT in the book or 84 film where Vicki is advocating that they train Charlie to control her power while Andy wants to just repress and never use it. (In the book/84 film Vicki and Andy both wanted Charlie to learn how to control her power.) Additionally they poison the dynamic between Andy and Charlie with all kinds of snark and bad vibes, and have Charlie actually tell her dad that she wished she had set him on fire. Yeah, so that doesn't bode well. Further, they re-introduce Rainbird as a former experiment volunteer turned psychic which obliterates The Shop's motivation to capture Charlie - why do they need her as a guinea pig to find out how psychic power works when they already have prior experiments and used that to produce agents? But its okay, it lets Rainbird make a BIPOC statement 'Did you think they would experiment on pretty White people first?' or something. So the structure gets all fucked up when Rainbird is sent to get Charlie after she blows up part of her school due to bullying (the bully is White, obviously, while the teach and principal are black and asian) and Rainbird kills the mom after psychically interrogating her. Andy and Charlie come home and confront Rainbird, and despite Vicki's body flopping out of the closet, Charlie only blasts Rainbird across the room, she does not kill him. So now they can't follow the plot of the book at all. After that Andy and Charlie go on the run, and while Andy is asleep in the car Charlie tries to pet a stray cat, it claws at her and she blasts it with fire. Its laying there, quietly yowling in agony in a pool of asphalt and Andy comes up and it like 'gotta put him out of his misery' and goads her to incinerating the cat to death. WHAT THE FUCK. They turned an adorable little girl that didn't want to hurt anyone into an evil bitch that wants to set her dad on fire.
After that, they combine two scenes from the book/84 film in a weird, shitty way and completely ruin Irv Mander as a character (who was a total badass old guy). I don't know why reboots and remakes do these kinds of things, it just reminds me of how good the first one was and how much the thing I'm watching sucks. So anyway, after some shitty scenes that are poorly shot and scripted worse The Shop has Andy captured and Charlie is free in the woods. After running in the woods and sleeping there overnight she decides that she has to go rescue her dad from the government facility she saw in a psychic vision- the dad she said she hated and wanted to burn alive. So she spends at most a few hours in a training montage, nearly causes a forest fire, then emerges into a cul de sac where three boys are biking. She uses her 'psychic domination' power to humiliate the White one, and asks 'where's the coast' and apparently in the space of an afternoon bikes to 'the coast' where the secret government facility is just sitting there. No security at the garage, so she waltzes into an Agent's car and after a short exchange melts his face, but just enough to torture him, then 'puts him out of his misery' like with the cat. Somehow the dude's ID card still works, so she tangos into the the cheapest looking interior corridors and finally finds her dad behind glass. TWIST ALERT: Her dad didn't send the psychic visions, it was Rainbird, somehow? And also The Shop has magic anti-mental domination contact lenses, so the new, diverse recast Captain Hollister can mug with Andy and promise to 'make Charlie a superhero' and saying 'you can't burn me without burning your dad.' So they pull the trigger on the 'Vicki was right because women always are and Andy has to come to terms and suffer for it' plotline and Andy realizes Charlie needs to use her powers for more murder. So he 'pushes' her with his physic domination to burn him (and Cap Hollister) alive, starting her extremely cheap looking 'rampage' through the facility which ends, bizarrely, with Rainbird presenting himself to be killed. Despite the fact that Rainbird killed her mom yesterday and just got her dad killed, she just walks past him. Then she strolls out to the beach, where Rainbird joins her, and she takes his hand and walks off into the credits with Rainbird. The guy that killed her mom.
The structural and technical issues alone are stupid - how Charlie bikes around and travels is ridiculous, that a simple flame suit makes one invincible to Charlie's power, how she survives cremating a man inside the same car she is in, how anti-psychic contacts work, all that shit is terrible but secondary to their inability to make a consistent theme work. Trying to shoehorn in some ridiculous feminist theme about how Charlie and her power are 'oppressed' by the patriarchy (Andy) not only doesn't make logical sense, it also destroys the foundational relationship between father and daughter. Adding in some kind of White Supremacy bullshit to make Rainbird a psychic and imply a whole other set of experiments destroys the narrative motivation for The Shop and also Rainbird's motivation. Everything gets so twisted up and non-sensical that not only is the overall plot completely incoherent, but scenes are disjointed and nonsensical.
The real horror of Firestarter 2022 is that the studio thought it was ready to release.
The plot of the book is that the government research agency, The Shop, is doing experiments with psychic-power inducing hallucinogens, which don't go well. 10 out of 12 college student volunteers die, but the two survivors bond over the experience, marry, and bear a child. Oh, and ever since getting injected, those two get mild psychic powers and their baby is a very powerful psychic, a pyromancer. Eventually the government freaks out, kills the mom, and sends dad and 8-year old Charlene 'Charlie' on the run. After a year of being fugitives, including cool scenes at an airport and the farm of a kindly Irv Mander they are eventually caught by the really weird agent John Rainbird, who is obsessed with knowing Charlie 'intimately' (by killing her) to take her power into the afterlife. At the Shop's facility, the dad is drugged and thought harmless, while Charlie is manipulated by Rainbird into demonstrating her power for the science tests. Eventually her dad (Andy) overcomes the drugs and tries to escape with Charlie, ending in a big firestorm.
The 1984 movie is a good adaptation and all around decent film. It follows the plot of the book pretty closely, with a few changes here and there to deal with the reality of film versus text - a few characters are merged, some scenes are extended, but it sticks to the formula. Which is good, because Stephen King, even while coked out of his mind, understands narrative structure. The special effects are fine enough, it isn't difficult to light stuff on fire or do fire stunts (and thankfully we get a lot of stuntmen on fire, its great), with more than adequate Italian-influenced and dramatic cinematography, directed by Mark Lester (Commando). It also stars a young Drew Barrymore alongside David Keith (as Andy, her dad) and Heather Locklear (as Vicki, her mom) - and this casting, to me, was key. The heart of the story, which the 2022 remake completely misses, is about the connection between parents and their children, specifically between Andy and Charlie.
A father's love and devotion is the driving force of both the novel and 1984 movie, and it only works because Barrymore and Keith particularly had extremely good chemistry and are so believable.
The recent remake completely fucks this emotional core of the story, absolutely and completely. First of all they up-age Charlie from 8 to 12, so instead of being adorable the actress is adolescent and bitchy, secondly the film spends a LOT of time with Vicki alive so they can build this really messed up dynamic that was NOT in the book or 84 film where Vicki is advocating that they train Charlie to control her power while Andy wants to just repress and never use it. (In the book/84 film Vicki and Andy both wanted Charlie to learn how to control her power.) Additionally they poison the dynamic between Andy and Charlie with all kinds of snark and bad vibes, and have Charlie actually tell her dad that she wished she had set him on fire. Yeah, so that doesn't bode well. Further, they re-introduce Rainbird as a former experiment volunteer turned psychic which obliterates The Shop's motivation to capture Charlie - why do they need her as a guinea pig to find out how psychic power works when they already have prior experiments and used that to produce agents? But its okay, it lets Rainbird make a BIPOC statement 'Did you think they would experiment on pretty White people first?' or something. So the structure gets all fucked up when Rainbird is sent to get Charlie after she blows up part of her school due to bullying (the bully is White, obviously, while the teach and principal are black and asian) and Rainbird kills the mom after psychically interrogating her. Andy and Charlie come home and confront Rainbird, and despite Vicki's body flopping out of the closet, Charlie only blasts Rainbird across the room, she does not kill him. So now they can't follow the plot of the book at all. After that Andy and Charlie go on the run, and while Andy is asleep in the car Charlie tries to pet a stray cat, it claws at her and she blasts it with fire. Its laying there, quietly yowling in agony in a pool of asphalt and Andy comes up and it like 'gotta put him out of his misery' and goads her to incinerating the cat to death. WHAT THE FUCK. They turned an adorable little girl that didn't want to hurt anyone into an evil bitch that wants to set her dad on fire.
After that, they combine two scenes from the book/84 film in a weird, shitty way and completely ruin Irv Mander as a character (who was a total badass old guy). I don't know why reboots and remakes do these kinds of things, it just reminds me of how good the first one was and how much the thing I'm watching sucks. So anyway, after some shitty scenes that are poorly shot and scripted worse The Shop has Andy captured and Charlie is free in the woods. After running in the woods and sleeping there overnight she decides that she has to go rescue her dad from the government facility she saw in a psychic vision- the dad she said she hated and wanted to burn alive. So she spends at most a few hours in a training montage, nearly causes a forest fire, then emerges into a cul de sac where three boys are biking. She uses her 'psychic domination' power to humiliate the White one, and asks 'where's the coast' and apparently in the space of an afternoon bikes to 'the coast' where the secret government facility is just sitting there. No security at the garage, so she waltzes into an Agent's car and after a short exchange melts his face, but just enough to torture him, then 'puts him out of his misery' like with the cat. Somehow the dude's ID card still works, so she tangos into the the cheapest looking interior corridors and finally finds her dad behind glass. TWIST ALERT: Her dad didn't send the psychic visions, it was Rainbird, somehow? And also The Shop has magic anti-mental domination contact lenses, so the new, diverse recast Captain Hollister can mug with Andy and promise to 'make Charlie a superhero' and saying 'you can't burn me without burning your dad.' So they pull the trigger on the 'Vicki was right because women always are and Andy has to come to terms and suffer for it' plotline and Andy realizes Charlie needs to use her powers for more murder. So he 'pushes' her with his physic domination to burn him (and Cap Hollister) alive, starting her extremely cheap looking 'rampage' through the facility which ends, bizarrely, with Rainbird presenting himself to be killed. Despite the fact that Rainbird killed her mom yesterday and just got her dad killed, she just walks past him. Then she strolls out to the beach, where Rainbird joins her, and she takes his hand and walks off into the credits with Rainbird. The guy that killed her mom.
The structural and technical issues alone are stupid - how Charlie bikes around and travels is ridiculous, that a simple flame suit makes one invincible to Charlie's power, how she survives cremating a man inside the same car she is in, how anti-psychic contacts work, all that shit is terrible but secondary to their inability to make a consistent theme work. Trying to shoehorn in some ridiculous feminist theme about how Charlie and her power are 'oppressed' by the patriarchy (Andy) not only doesn't make logical sense, it also destroys the foundational relationship between father and daughter. Adding in some kind of White Supremacy bullshit to make Rainbird a psychic and imply a whole other set of experiments destroys the narrative motivation for The Shop and also Rainbird's motivation. Everything gets so twisted up and non-sensical that not only is the overall plot completely incoherent, but scenes are disjointed and nonsensical.
The real horror of Firestarter 2022 is that the studio thought it was ready to release.
