Carrie Remake Emphasizes Modern Approach

There is a remake of Carrie underway, the classic movie originally starring Sissy Spacek and based on the first novel by Stephen King.  In an article on Wired, there is great emphasis on how the story unfolds and how it has been modernized so that young viewers will get the references.  The original is nearly forty years old now, and a bit dated.

I suppose my problem isn't the dated references, that is just window dressing on an amazing story.  My problem is the retelling skips at least two things that made Carrie different.  Her utter isolation, and Carrie herself.  Even King says in his memoir On Writing that he didn't like Carrie White.  He wanted to, he tried to, and in the end he would have been one of the kids throwing tampons and yelling at the big sluggish beast of a girl who had never known a touch of good fortune.  On Writing actually introduces you to the girl who started the idea of the perpetually bullied girl, an interesting story to read.

This let Carrie be an entirely different character.  It's a big creepy that King was able to get into the mind of a teenage girl, but his distaste colored his portrayal so that the reader didn't really like her either.  In that particular setting, that one in a million story that doesn't rely on liking your protagonist, it made a diamond out of the rough.  We wanted to slap Carrie, her mother grossed us out, and we knew it was wrong.  That was the beauty of the story.  That was the point.  We had to confront our inner bullies while we watched Carrie deal with her classmates.  The gorgeous girl playing Carrie tells me this will be lost in the gore and the horror.

If I had to tip my hat to one thing, it would be casting Julianne Moore as Carrie's insane mother, Margaret White.  Moore has the chops to scare us, and the intelligence to see the many layers of the character.  Like anyone, no character is all good or all evil.  Moore can make her scary and keep her human.  It was her simple and twisted humanity that made her so scary to begin with.