Both versions deal with Carrie White, the odd high school girl tormented at home by her crazed, fanatical mother Margaret and detested by her classmates. By entering adolescence in the worst of times and places, she provides them with an excuse to make her life even more miserable when a supernatural force is awakened in her (Telekinesis-the ability to move objects with the mind), as they often do with Stephen King characters. The bullies are banned from attending their senior prom, the site where they'll plan the most repugnant of revenges on the now powerful Carrie and something will have to give, to say the least.
The movie starts with Carrie’s mother (Julianne Moore) alone in a room giving birth to the protagonist and pondering whether to end her brief life with a pair of gigantic clippers. A case could be made that the images of a baby and scissors should never appear in the same frame, but at least the movie starts with a scene that would seem to suggest that all bets are off and this will be an original rendering of the Stephen King story (or a re-imagining, as they like to call it). From that point on, the new “Carrie” uses most of the same dialogue as its 1976 predecessor and replicates most of its scenes with other techniques. The main variations to the plot being that it is now the popular boy who comments on Carrie’s poem in class (as opposed to the other way around) as well as some updates to make things more contemporary, like a father threatening to sue the school if her daughter isn’t allowed to go to the prom (how times have changed!) and Carrie’s enemies now using iPhones to communicate among themselves and YouTube to post their shenanigans. This is basically the extent of the changes to the 1976 script, even though they required the services of two new screenwriters.
The role that turns out best here is the one played by Julianne Moore’s, but she is a little bit too good-looking for the part and not someone you’d make sure to cross the street to avoid. This Margaret White just doesn’t feel as damaged a character, nor one with the kind of baggage that Piper Laurie once suggested. In regard to the title role, what once made Sissy Spaceck’s take on Carrie so memorable was how she was able to evolve seamlessly from a creepy outsider to a beautiful duckling and then to an unforgiving Movie Monster. In contrast, Chloë Grace Moretz looks much too normal and remains more or less the same throughout the newer film. Her Carrie is neither someone we can’t imagine being asked to the prom nor one who’d be able to scare the hell out of an audience. Her acting approach in the “shy” stages consists mainly of slouching, and, when applying revenge to her tormentors, instead of the sudden close-ups of Spacek’s face accompanied by the fantastic sound of "Psycho"-like cords, we get a lot of hand and arm twitching in a fashion that brings to mind Yoda when using the Force to handle heavy objects.
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