"Firestarter" - Film Review
All remakes beg the question “why?” Why now? Why is this text worth revisiting at this moment in time? It’s a heavier burden than most people expect when they decide to remake a film. Their burden of proof for existence is twice that of completely original projects. Remakes must add something new to affirm their existence, but more often than not, they crumple under the weight of the expectations of everyone who has seen the original.
Such is the case with Firestarter. The film is based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name and the 1984 film. Why the film was revived is unclear. Firestarter, both the book and the original movie, always felt a bit like a precursor to Carrie, despite the fact that they came later. Both feature a young woman coming of age with volatile, special powers.
Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) lives with her parents, Andy (Zac Efron) and Vicky (Sydney Lemmon), in a small Massachusetts town. She’s teased at school and called Amish because she doesn’t have the internet at home, her clothes are strange, and she’s generally seen as weird. Little do those kids know, there’s something else about the way Charlie and her parents live that makes them odd.
universal pictures
When they were in college, Andy and Vicky were selected to participate in a program that was run by a company named DSI. The purpose was to test a serum called Lot Six on humans. It was DSI’s special concoction that was meant to intensify any supernatural powers that might already exist in people. Both Andy and Vicky developed extraordinary powers from Lot Six. When they had Charlie, it became evident that those powers, and more, were passed on to their daughter. DSI wanted to keep Charlie to test her as she grew, but Andy and Vicky didn’t want their child to experience the pain they went through. The family went on the run to keep young Charlie safe.
Firestarter should either be a campy romp or a semi-serious look at the way people try to quell the rage of young women. The film has fleeting moments of attempts at both, but none of those moments land because the rest of the film feels hollow. There are names like Stephen King, Jason Blum, and John Carpenter attached, but it’s woefully, and surprisingly, unscary. If there are any jump scares, they barely register. It surely wouldn’t even elicit a nightmare at a middle school sleepover.
With this remake, Firestarter had the ability to ask interesting questions about abuse of power within the medical field, the terror of coming of age, and the trauma of a hiding one’s true self. Instead, the audience gets a lackluster, barely reimagined version of a movie that they simply did not want or need.
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