Review of the thriller "Firestarter", a phenomenally lousy adaptation of Stephen King's novel
A film that fights hard for the title of the worst adaptation of Stephen King, but loses even at that.
Young, penniless students are willing to participate in a $200 cash experiment in a university department. Half of the participants will be injected with a placebo - just water, and the other half with a small amount of a hallucinogenic substance, absolutely harmless, according to the medical examiners. As a result of these experiments Andy (Zac Efron) and Vicky (Sidney Lemmon) not only fall in love with each other, but they also acquired paranormal powers (or developed the existing ones - history keeps silent, the characters avert their eyes enigmatically). Years later, the couple are already raising a daughter, Charlie (Ryan Keira Armstrong), who has inherited a genetic trait: if the girl is upset or angry, the kitchen utensils and mittens on her mother's hands burn. The family of telepaths and pyrokineticists cannot live happily and serenely - the government intends to use the "secret development" for its not the most humane purposes or to destroy the weapons with excessive free will.
Stephen King is the most screenable contemporary author, so it is not surprising that most of the films based on his novels, stories and novellas shoot hollow, a matter of percentage error. But each new failure is as perplexing as the first, precisely because of the natural cinematic nature of the writer's language. Even in translation, King of Terror's syllable is saturated with visual imagery, and each new page depicts in detail the texture of the area, from the color of a grocery store sign to the license plate of a passing car. Over time (and almost 50 years have passed since King's first film adaptation), the author's recognizable trappings have become a set of stamps on which the new "Flaming Stare" is built.
Go directly to the discussion of the film does not want to. The film looks as if the final copy on the editing table was assembled from other screen adaptations of the writer, sci-fi series and several videos with Zac Efron, completely ignoring the need for a script base. The story seeks to escape as far as possible either from the source material or from Mark L. Lester's painting, "Fire Spawning," which was faithful to the author's letter. Papa Ephron offers some unconscious passages about violence, and the charming Keira Armstrong plays the Eleventh, with the "Very Stranger Things" heroine being Charlie's heiress, played by Drew Barrymore. As a result, the screen reproduces a tracing of tracing, which does not want to be tracing at all, and what it wants - it is not clear, but it clearly does not succeed.
Instead of continuing to monotonously list the weaknesses of Incendiary, we can fantasize about the kind of movie we might see. The screenwriter for the project was Scott Timms: in the group of co-writers he worked on the second chapter of the new incarnation of "Halloween" - not brilliant, but a bearable return of the cult slasher. Michael Myers' footprint was also left behind by the forefather of body count films: John Carpenter, along with his son Cody, served as the film's composers. Only about the soundtrack, perhaps, does one want to talk in a positive way. But that doesn't mean that The Incendiary is worth watching.
The fate of director Keith Thomas seems disappointing as well. The director made his debut in feature-length with the rather curious horror film "Dybbuk", where Jewish customs were applied to the familiar storyline of "Viyu" (a young man has to read prayers all night long and drive the evil undead away from the body of the deceased). Probably because of the unanimous failure of The Incendiary Stare (which is rather Blumhouse's producer's fault) Thomas will not be offered studio projects any time soon, which is a pity.
Still, it's strange that King's screen adaptations have so often suffered an unhappy fate. Either it's a sign to us horror fans to hold on to our books more tightly, or it's an instruction to filmmakers to read more carefully rather than fantasize from the pictures on the paperbacks. In any case, it is obvious that we are doomed to see many more mediocre adaptations of the writer's novels, and thus a few exceptional ones as well - it's a matter of percentage margin of error.
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