Review of Firestarter (1984) by Edith N — 12 Nov 2009

Why Do They Do Such Dreadful Things to King?

There actually is, in this world, such thing as a good Stephen King movie. They are few and far between, true, and most of them are movies no one thinks of as Stephen King stories ([i]Shawshank Redemption[/i], [i]Stand by Me[/i], [i]The Green Mile[/i]), but they do exist. There are even some not-terrible ones, though the dividing line there is drawn in different places by different people. (I happen to like [i]Secret Window[/i], actually.) Roger reminds us that a total of five movies based on King works came out that year. One of those, [i]Children of the Corn[/i], has spawned about a billion direct-to-video/DVD sequels. Impressive for such a short story. [i]Cujo[/i] and [i]Christine[/i] are neither of them very good, of about the quality of this, actually. In that year, however, was one of the most extraordinary King adaptations, the more so because it's from an ostensible horror novel--[i]The Dead Zone[/i]. (This was then made into a TV show which had terribly little to do with anything.) Stephen King horror doesn't usually get translated well to the screen. This is one more sad example of that fact.

Charlie McGee (Drew Barrymore) is a very special little girl. Her parents, Andy (David Keith) and Vicky (Heather Locklear), met at the trial of a drug which made them different. They were given certain gifts, gifts which in Kingland are actually things everyone has but cannot reliably access. Anyway, the McGees now have certain psychic powers. They have passed on the gift of pyrokinesis to Charlie. The lot of them are now being sought by a group called the Shop--the McGees were never supposed to marry, you see, and certainly weren't supposed to have children. However, since Charlie has been born, the Shop is determined to take advantage of it--and her. They kill Vicky, and Andy and Charlie take off. However, they do not have the resources of the Shop, and they are caught. Charlie swears that she won't use her powers, so they send creepy John Rainbird (an inexplicable George C. Scott) to win her trust, which he manages to do awfully quickly. Sped up for movie time, I guess. Anyway, you can kind of figure out on your own where things are going to go. And if you can't, the poster will doubtless help.

The special effects on this movie are silly. When Charlie--short for Charlene--is starting fires, one of the signs of it is a fan blowing up her back and blowing her hair out. Later in the film, when she's doing more complicated stuff, even that isn't the worst bit. When she makes bullets essentially explode, it looks as though they've just superimposed footage of fireworks from something else onto the screen. Even those aren't the worst. Okay, yes, 1984. However, if you don't have the technology to do the effects well, you should perhaps reconsider if you're ready to tell the story at all. George Lucas, for all his flaws, knew that, and that's why he took so long putting out the prequels. (He should have waited until he had better scripts, but that's another complaint for another time.) This is one of a handful of movies I'd actually like to see remade, because I think we're up to the right level of technology now.

This, at least, should be said. Usually, the weak link in a movie like this would be its child star. Drew Barrymore was nine at the time. This is not an age where you really expect skill. Talent, of course, is an innate thing, and someone of Barrymore's lineage was rather expected to have had it. Her great-uncle played one of the most iconic evil capitalists of all time, after all, and her grandfather was the only one of the three siblings who never won an Oscar. (I choose to blame the booze.) Now, true, that influenced her in other ways--it took her grandfather some doing to be the drunk Barrymore. However, whether genetic or not, she does have a great deal of talent and did, even then, have a great deal of skill. She is under a lot of pressure, really, to stand up in skill to the rest of the cast. There are, let's face it, three Oscar winners in the movie, not to mention Martin Sheen. No, she wasn't as good as any of them, but she certainly wasn't as bad as you might expect of a nine-year-old.

Stephen King's newest book just came out the other day. It weighs in at a whopping 1072 pages, 1074 if you count the author's note. This is long by Stephen King standards, though not unprecedented. (Though it's been since [i]It[/i].) This, hopefully, means that it will never be a movie. [i]Firestarter[/i], if nothing else, serves as an object lesson of where movies based on King's works often go wrong. Much of the original story is either internal, flashback, or both, which doesn't translate well here. King's dialogue may not be cinematic, but his use of words is one of the things which drives his following, at least in part. His characters tend to have motivations which can't come across in film--what do you think fills all those pages? And, as King himself knows, imagining what's there is often scarier than seeing what's there. Drew Barrymore's an awful good damsel in distress here, and this makes her a decent Charlie. Does David Keith make a good Andy? Does George C. Scott make a good John Rainbird? (On that--leaving aside the fact that I thought he was, well, not white, he is not, contrary to what Roger thought, a pedophile particularly. His interest in Charlie is not prurient.) One of the reasons the ones which work do work is that you can connect to the characters, and you can't, here. All the good has been wrung out of the book, and what's left got thrown up on the screen.