Movies
‘Firestarter’ Review – Modern Reimagining of Stephen King’s Novel Fails to Ignite
Bloody Disgusting’s Firestarter review is spoiler-free.
The Stephen King renaissance continues with a modern adaptation of his 1980 novel, Firestarter. Considering the lackluster response to the 1984 adaptation, it’s likely long overdue. But the real question is whether there’s any thematic depth or storytelling to mine amidst superhero cinema’s current oversaturation and popularity. While The Vigil director Keith Thomas does get Firestarter off to an energetic and engaging start, this reimaging ultimately fails to ignite.
The exposition of how couple Andy (Zac Efron) and Vicky (Sydney Lemmon) gained supernatural abilities, courtesy of an experiment, gets relayed over the opening credits. One nightmare sequence later, Firestarter jumps a decade ahead, where Andy and Vicky attempt to raise their gifted daughter Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) and avoid detection by the federal agency that would reclaim them. As if being perpetually on the run isn’t draining enough, Charlie is losing her struggle to repress her mounting powers. Cue an incendiary event that places the family back on the agency’s radar, putting them all in danger.
(from left) Vicky (Sydney Lemmon) and Andy (Zac Efron) in Firestarter, directed by Keith Thomas.
Written by Halloween Kills scribe Scott Teems, Firestarter breaks down into two vastly different halves. The first half builds character dynamics and establishes the emotional stakes. Andy and Vicky are doting parents but with two distinctly different approaches to parenting a young child with immense combustible power. Complicating the conflicting ideals are the contrasting yet similar ways their diminished abilities are ill-equipped to support and control Charlie’s tenuous restraint of her emotions, often resulting in catastrophe. Zac Efron brings a lot to his role, doing a lot of heavy lifting in the front half.
Once Rainbird (Michael Greyeyes) enters the equation fully, prompting a more action-heavy shift with the family on the run, the script derails. Early explorations of morality and consequences get dropped in favor of pyrotechnics, choppy and bland action sequences, and thinly rendered archetypical baddies in Captain Hollister (Gloria Reuben).
It’s all significantly underdeveloped. There’s a clear arc intended for Rainbird, a significant departure from the source material, but Greyeyes is woefully underutilized. While Firestarter wants to make Rainbird an imposing central antagonist, his screen time is far too limited and cringe dialogue too cryptic to grasp motivations and identity fully.
Michael Greyeyes as Rainbird in Firestarter, directed by Keith Thomas.
The entire back half gets rushed. It eschews the source material in favor of a streamlined narrative set in a nondescript concrete facility. A central internal struggle gets tidily squared away with a simple montage. Set pieces, major confrontations, emotional payoffs, and the climax come across so haphazardly that none of it lands. The goodwill built up in the front half gets squandered by the strange narrative and stylistic choices.
It results in a disjointed adaptation that entails two very different features at diverging levels of craft. It feels like chunks of story were excised, leaving behind remnants that hint toward something more interesting. Its protagonists fare much stronger, all given a bit more to work with and time to develop them. The antagonists are so blandly and vaguely written that Firestarter collapses quickly once the narrative attempts to widen the scope beyond the family’s cozy bubble. Despite a strong performance by Zac Efron, a few fun charred corpses, John Carpenter‘s superior score, and brisk pacing, Firestarter winds up mirroring Charlie’s story a little too closely. A promising beginning comes unraveled by the desire to burn it all down.
Firestarter releases in theaters and on Peacock on May 13, 2022.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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