Firestarter
On the one hand, I miss the Hell out of John Carpenter as a director. He always delivered interesting takes of genre, whether it was straight horror, science-fiction, or action-adventure. That being said, if he wants to transition to being a film composer for the rest of his career, you will not hear any complaints out of me. Why he chose to do the new version of “Firestarter” is beyond me.
I’ve never seen the 1984 adaptation of Stephen King’s story of a young girl with telekinetic powers to unleash fire, but everything I’ve heard about it is that the base story just being another version of Carrie from King. There are cosmetic differences, of course, but Keith Thomas’s 2022 doesn’t do much to convince us otherwise. This is as generic a thriller as we’ve ever gotten adapted from King’s prose, and doesn’t really add anything in terms of subtext to the material to merit existing.
I will admit- the opening sequences showing Andy and Vicky McGee (Zac Efron and Sydney Lemmon) being questioned by an unseen interrogator (later revealed to be Kurtwood Smith’s Dr. Joseph Wanless) sets us up for an interesting thriller. We then see Andy having a nightmare about a fire starting in their daughter’s room. Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) wakes up; she’s had the same dream. The McGee’s have been on the run from the government for so long, but when Charlie has an incident at her school, things start to heat up again for them. See what I did there?
Mixing horror with government paranoia is not an uninteresting concept, but there’s not enough meat on the bones of King’s story, much less the screenplay by Scott Teems, to make this remotely interesting. That Andy and Vicky were part of the same experiment, and they had Charlie, is an interesting idea, but it’s not really fleshed out in any substantial way. There’s no depth to anything in this film; another individual, Rainbird (Michael Greyeyes), was part of the same experiment, is sent after them, and while that could have opened up some compelling narrative concepts, he’s just a more formidable antagonist for the family, and even then, not much is done with that.
John Carpenter was originally set up to direct “Firestarter” in 1984, but went over to “Christine” instead. This feels like a full-circle chance for him to help tell this story in being brought in- with Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies- to write the music. Their score has an energy and personality this film is unable to produce on-screen, and honestly, if you just wanted to skip the film and listen to the score on its own, it might be a better use of your time. Even just musically, Carpenter continues to prove why he is one of the great storytellers in film.
