These comments refer to the 2003 20th Anniversary DVD release.
In a way, Stephen King and John Carpenter deserve each other. Each has produced an uneven body of work. Halloween, for instance, despite its forced sequels, was a truly heart-pounding thriller. The Thing was a gross-out bomb. Christine stands, in my opinion, as King's most enduring work. By contrast, Pet Semetary was also a gross-out bomb. John Carpenter's movie version of Christine is somewhere in the middle between success and failure. It is successful because, even if one hasn't read the book, a viewer will stick with it simply to find out how everything turns out. It is a failure because it tries to use shorthand to fill in for the material that made King's novel worthwhile. In interviews with this DVD both Carpenter and writer Bill Phillips proclaim that they decided to eliminate the Roland D. LeBay back story in favor of making the car the centerpiece. They try to fill in by introducing LeBay's brother, George, as a sort of surrogate, right down to Roland's filthy back brace. Readers will connect the brace with the Roland character in the novel, but in the film it merely distracts from the rest of the scene. They also try to fill in by crafting a completely original opening assembly line sequence that supposedly introduces the evil that is present in the car that would one day be called Christine. This one decision loses the impact of the novel, whose point is that the evil which possessed the car came from Roland LeBay's own poisoned soul--and that evil persisted after his death. By placing the evil in an inanimate object (and then attempting to persuade us that car is somehow alive) Carpenter and Phillips cause us to cease to care. Each of us has dealt with inanimate objects which appear to have a will of their own, but Christine is stretches us beyond the limit. The deleted scenes included with the 2003 release show evidence that, in limited ways, Carpenter and Phillips understood this. For instance, in one hospital scene, Dennis has Arnie sign his cast. In a deleted scene, occurring a bit later, Dennis asks for another signature. The point, of course, is that the two are completely different. Arnie is possessed by the evil soul of Roland LeBay. The minutes devoted to the opening sequence should have been used to flesh out this back story.
Readers of the novel know that King set the story in a working-class suburb of Pittsburgh. The complexity of that setting is itself a kind of character. Within minutes, we discover that the movie is set in California, a part of America that most Pittsburghers would perceive as particularly shallow. Carpenter undoubtedly did this to avoid extensive winter sequences, including one particularly brutal blizzard. It's but another short cut that trivializes the story.
King's novel is a highly effective meditation on the persistence of evil. The movie inspires no terror and no dread. It isn't even particularly humorous. Instead, we stay with it just to see how it comes out. The great strength of King's novel is that it was about people and only marginally about the car. In casting unknowns, and then buying 24 1958 Plymouths, Carpenter asked us to focus on the car. It doesn't work. Here is my proposal: Let's ask Frank Darabont to take a run at a remake. He did a wonderful job with the King novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (shortened to The Shawshank Redemption for the film) and the serial novel The Green Mile. Those films work because Darabont took King's work seriously in terms of time and place, and because he took the time to develop the characters. A remake of Christine at Darabont's hands, at about the same length as Shawshank or Green Mile, would be worth seeing.
In a way, Stephen King and John Carpenter deserve each other. Each has produced an uneven body of work. Halloween, for instance, despite its forced sequels, was a truly heart-pounding thriller. The Thing was a gross-out bomb. Christine stands, in my opinion, as King's most enduring work. By contrast, Pet Semetary was also a gross-out bomb. John Carpenter's movie version of Christine is somewhere in the middle between success and failure. It is successful because, even if one hasn't read the book, a viewer will stick with it simply to find out how everything turns out. It is a failure because it tries to use shorthand to fill in for the material that made King's novel worthwhile. In interviews with this DVD both Carpenter and writer Bill Phillips proclaim that they decided to eliminate the Roland D. LeBay back story in favor of making the car the centerpiece. They try to fill in by introducing LeBay's brother, George, as a sort of surrogate, right down to Roland's filthy back brace. Readers will connect the brace with the Roland character in the novel, but in the film it merely distracts from the rest of the scene. They also try to fill in by crafting a completely original opening assembly line sequence that supposedly introduces the evil that is present in the car that would one day be called Christine. This one decision loses the impact of the novel, whose point is that the evil which possessed the car came from Roland LeBay's own poisoned soul--and that evil persisted after his death. By placing the evil in an inanimate object (and then attempting to persuade us that car is somehow alive) Carpenter and Phillips cause us to cease to care. Each of us has dealt with inanimate objects which appear to have a will of their own, but Christine is stretches us beyond the limit. The deleted scenes included with the 2003 release show evidence that, in limited ways, Carpenter and Phillips understood this. For instance, in one hospital scene, Dennis has Arnie sign his cast. In a deleted scene, occurring a bit later, Dennis asks for another signature. The point, of course, is that the two are completely different. Arnie is possessed by the evil soul of Roland LeBay. The minutes devoted to the opening sequence should have been used to flesh out this back story.
Readers of the novel know that King set the story in a working-class suburb of Pittsburgh. The complexity of that setting is itself a kind of character. Within minutes, we discover that the movie is set in California, a part of America that most Pittsburghers would perceive as particularly shallow. Carpenter undoubtedly did this to avoid extensive winter sequences, including one particularly brutal blizzard. It's but another short cut that trivializes the story.
King's novel is a highly effective meditation on the persistence of evil. The movie inspires no terror and no dread. It isn't even particularly humorous. Instead, we stay with it just to see how it comes out. The great strength of King's novel is that it was about people and only marginally about the car. In casting unknowns, and then buying 24 1958 Plymouths, Carpenter asked us to focus on the car. It doesn't work. Here is my proposal: Let's ask Frank Darabont to take a run at a remake. He did a wonderful job with the King novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (shortened to The Shawshank Redemption for the film) and the serial novel The Green Mile. Those films work because Darabont took King's work seriously in terms of time and place, and because he took the time to develop the characters. A remake of Christine at Darabont's hands, at about the same length as Shawshank or Green Mile, would be worth seeing.