Well, I think I'm just about done - for life - with Carrie movies, and in fine form, I saved the worst for last. Filmed 26 years after the first one (and eleven before the theatrical do-over), the overarching question throughout the movie is "Why???"
I honestly don't know what motivated this made-for-TV version, the longest and dullest of the three. I might throw out a guess that since The Shining was remade (and, unlike this one, endorsed by King himself), a producer out there somewhere felt it wasn't beyond the pale to give Carrie a TV makeover as well. The main failings of going on this theory is that (1) the "new" Shining was inferior to the Kubrick original, and (2) Stephen King actually loved the original De Palma film, so much so that this one and the 2013 version aren't even listed on his website.
There was the whole matter of making a TV show (I've read many places this was a "backdoor pilot") which never happened, because, well, what exactly comes after this? The Sue Snell Mysteries? A remake of The Rage: Carrie 2? Perhaps the producers saw the opportunity for a special effects upgrade. This was certainly a big motivation for the 2013 film, while this one seemed to lack the budget to offer a credible improvement to the first movie. Right from the opening credits, it feels more like we're going to be settling in for a three-hour version of Law & Order.
Or, perhaps because of the backdoor pilot design, they wanted to tell a new version of a story that, by this time, was well-burned into the popular imagination. For one thing, it sports a very different ending from either the book or the other movies. It also adds a few scenes that contradict the assertions of the book. Carrie is depicted as totally googly for Tommy Ross right from the get-go and fantasizes kissing him right before the bucket-o-blood scene hits. Carrie behaves more like a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde character who turns on and off based on external triggers, and it is clear that the non-psychotic Carrie was not aware of what she did while "possessed". And to repeat, the ending is different (spoiler alert...) in that she lives past Prom Night, surviving an attempt by her mother to drown her, although she required some half-assed CPR from Sue Snell. No knives were involved, as in this version Carrie can use her telekinesis to stop her mom's heart. Sue, her brand-new partner in crime, agrees to fake her death and drive her off to Florida, presumably where the next episode of the never-made show would take place?
I do have some nice things to say about this most-maligned Carrie. First off, it's the only one of the three films in which Carrie asks a librarian for assistance rather than wantonly tearing through the stacks. That said, this librarian steered her to some primitive websites, found with some type of proto-Google search engine (which only returned 26 results, all trustworthy, on the keyword search "miracles"). It was also the only one that stayed true to the book in that Sue Snell stayed home during Prom Night, and in general Sue's character seems closest to the book of any of the three movies. Finally, in the true-to-the-book department, Carrie's path of destruction clearly ravaged the whole town of Chamberlain, not just her school and house.
In closing, I think it should be a law that anything filmed in or around Vancouver, typically a budget-saving move, should be stamped under the title card in all caps "FILMED IN VANCOUVER" unless it is actually supposed to take place in Vancouver. While unlike some other TV shows and movies I've seen, it doesn't look obviously Canadian, but these productions seem to attract the same actors over and over. For example Kandyse McClure (Sue Snell) would later appear in Vancouver-based Battlestar Galactica, and Emile de Ravin (Chris Hargensen) and Rena Sofer (Ms. Desjarden) in Once Upon a Time (yep, also Vancouver).
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