Blockbuster History: Firestarting
Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: we are far enough into the present wave of Stephen King adaptations that we've hit the "all the famous ones were taken" stage with a new adaptation of nobody's favorite King novel, Firestarter. When this was last filmed, also during a wave of King adaptations, at least it had the excuse of being a fairly new book.
Even for a writer as indebted to Baby Boomer culture as Stephen King, the story of Firestarter is some real Boomer shit. Boil it down to its essence, and it looks like this: two college students were given telepathic powers due to some government-sponsored experiments with a made-up LSD analogue. They hooked up and had a child, and now she has the ability to start fires with her mind, so the nefarious no-good government spooks are chasing the father and daughter (mom is by this point dead), proving how profoundly amoral and untrustworthy secretive government types are. It is the most aggressively post-hippie, post-Watergate narrative of King's that I can name.
As far as the 1984 film adaptation of the 1980 novel goes (one of the most faithful of the first wave of King adaptations that was just starting to run out of steam by '84), that is pretty much it. There's a bit more that starts to happen once the secret government types - "The Shop", they're called - actually catches up to Andrew McGee (David Keith) and his eight-year-old daughter Charlie (Drew Barrymore), but still, "nefarious, conspiratorial G-men are nefarious, must be run from" gets through a whole lot of screentime. A whole lot. Firestarter is 114 minutes long, and if it doesn't seem like the plot I've sketched out could earn almost two hours... in fairness, that's because the plot I've sketched out only really brings us up to the 70-minute mark. But still, if it sounds like Firestarter is longer than it has story for, that's 100% because that's exactly the case. Those 70 minutes are crushingly boring, some of the least-engaging cinematic material ever based on King's writing, and he's an author with a notiriously low success rate for adaptations of his work turning out well.
The good news, or at least the news that offers some respite to the poor soul who has decided to throw themselves at Firestarter despite its almost total lack of an ongoing reputation, good or bad (I am tempted to say that it has the lowest profile out of any King adaptation made through the end of the 1980s, and only 1985's Silver Bullet even slightly threatens it for that title), is that starting in the second hour, we actually start to get material that begins to feel like the stuff of a motion picture that you could more or less watch and extract some kind of pleasure from. Mostly, this is because the second hour puts Barrymore in the same scenes as George C. Scott, who plays Rainbird, an assassin and all-around fixer for The Shop. Barrymore was a supernaturally talented child actor, but she still ultimately needed to take her cues from the adults around her, and Keith's milquetoast screen presence certainly wasn't giving her any fuel to burn, as it were. Scott is, for that whole first half and then some, the only person onscreen who is even a little tiny bit engaging to watch: the actor's characteristic snappish tone and meanspirited impatience fit the role of a smart, deadly government agent very well, and while people like Keith and Martin Sheen (oddly vacuous as the head of The Shop) all but fall off the screen, Scott at least gets to be a hostile presence. When he and Barrymore are paired off, it's the immediate benefit to both of them: Scott gets to shade his performance by demonstrating that Rainbird can also be a master manipulator, cloying and insidious in presenting himself as the only kind, understanding grown-up around, while Barrymore immediately starts thriving in the presence of an actor who provides her with literally anything to react to.
But again, that's seventy minutes into the movie. Up to that point, Firestarter is almost unwatchably dull. It gets off to a good enough start, leaping right into the chase and then catching us up on the backstory (the book did the same), but that gets us maybe five minutes worth of momentum. There are only so many ways of staging and filming functionally identical scenes of Shop functionaries grumbling too each other; there are only so many ways of framing Keith to look like an exhausted hunted animal and concerned parent. And the filmmakers, under the command of Mark L. Lester (whose career most likely peaked with Class of 1984 in 1982, which is solid exploitation cinema and not really what you'd like to have as a career peak) haven't really tried to exhaust even that limited number of ways. To put it bluntly, Firestarter is a somewhat horrible-looking movie, squandering cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzolini (a regular collaborator of Pier Paolo Pasolini who'd also worked with Sergio Leone) on a series of images whose flat lighting only serves to accentuate the flat blocking. The movie chokes on a harsh brown-on-brown color scheme that's all wrong for the film stock they were using, which already leeches out color, leading to a film with an unpleasant look that's simultaneously muddy and metallic.
Meanwhile, the plot's lack of any real momentum or development is underscored by what I think must surely be the very worst film score ever composed by Tangerine Dream. I'm well aware that just about every one of the band's soundtracks has its detractors (even the haunting, hallucinatory music they contributed to 1981's Thief, one of my very favorite film scores of the 1980s, was Razzie-nominated), but I'm typically ready and willing to fight on their behalf every time. Not here, though. The music in Firestarter is a disaster, frankly, adding a hazy electronic veneer to material that's in desperate need of being weighted down, not given yet another reason to feel like the movie is floating off. In one particularly awful moment, Tangerine Dream has attempted to write a bit of aw-shucks, Fourth-of-July-and-apple-pie Americana to accompany Andy and Charlie's arrival at the country farmhouse of Irv (Art Carney) and Norma (Louise Fletcher), and those kinds of kitschy corn-pone motifs played on the band's usual set of electronic instruments sounds like an awful parody of a slovenly '80s movie trying to evoke down-home simplicity. Which is, I guess, precisely what this is.
In short, the first half of the film is dire - not on par with the worst of the worst King adaptations, since that gets us down into some truly hellish depths, but surely on par with the worst of the "profoundly mediocre" ones. It improves - a lot, really - when it can find ways to start shunting Keith to the side and relying more on Scott and Barrymore to carry the human emotions of the piece, but it's a long road to get there, and even once it arrives, the question of whether Firestarter at its best is ever more than simply competent enough to be watched once and immediately forgotten remains uncomfortably open. The whole movie lands with a heavy thud, wholly devoid of the sharp paranoid edge that the material demands. The conspiracy is too flatfooted to represent a threat, the heroes too generic to generate any sense of urgency as they run from that conspiracy. And the fire effects are almost all held until the last act, so it's not even terribly effective as a paranormal thriller. It's, if you'll forgive me for saying it, too damp for any sparks to ever catch hold and start burning.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Even for a writer as indebted to Baby Boomer culture as Stephen King, the story of Firestarter is some real Boomer shit. Boil it down to its essence, and it looks like this: two college students were given telepathic powers due to some government-sponsored experiments with a made-up LSD analogue. They hooked up and had a child, and now she has the ability to start fires with her mind, so the nefarious no-good government spooks are chasing the father and daughter (mom is by this point dead), proving how profoundly amoral and untrustworthy secretive government types are. It is the most aggressively post-hippie, post-Watergate narrative of King's that I can name.
As far as the 1984 film adaptation of the 1980 novel goes (one of the most faithful of the first wave of King adaptations that was just starting to run out of steam by '84), that is pretty much it. There's a bit more that starts to happen once the secret government types - "The Shop", they're called - actually catches up to Andrew McGee (David Keith) and his eight-year-old daughter Charlie (Drew Barrymore), but still, "nefarious, conspiratorial G-men are nefarious, must be run from" gets through a whole lot of screentime. A whole lot. Firestarter is 114 minutes long, and if it doesn't seem like the plot I've sketched out could earn almost two hours... in fairness, that's because the plot I've sketched out only really brings us up to the 70-minute mark. But still, if it sounds like Firestarter is longer than it has story for, that's 100% because that's exactly the case. Those 70 minutes are crushingly boring, some of the least-engaging cinematic material ever based on King's writing, and he's an author with a notiriously low success rate for adaptations of his work turning out well.
The good news, or at least the news that offers some respite to the poor soul who has decided to throw themselves at Firestarter despite its almost total lack of an ongoing reputation, good or bad (I am tempted to say that it has the lowest profile out of any King adaptation made through the end of the 1980s, and only 1985's Silver Bullet even slightly threatens it for that title), is that starting in the second hour, we actually start to get material that begins to feel like the stuff of a motion picture that you could more or less watch and extract some kind of pleasure from. Mostly, this is because the second hour puts Barrymore in the same scenes as George C. Scott, who plays Rainbird, an assassin and all-around fixer for The Shop. Barrymore was a supernaturally talented child actor, but she still ultimately needed to take her cues from the adults around her, and Keith's milquetoast screen presence certainly wasn't giving her any fuel to burn, as it were. Scott is, for that whole first half and then some, the only person onscreen who is even a little tiny bit engaging to watch: the actor's characteristic snappish tone and meanspirited impatience fit the role of a smart, deadly government agent very well, and while people like Keith and Martin Sheen (oddly vacuous as the head of The Shop) all but fall off the screen, Scott at least gets to be a hostile presence. When he and Barrymore are paired off, it's the immediate benefit to both of them: Scott gets to shade his performance by demonstrating that Rainbird can also be a master manipulator, cloying and insidious in presenting himself as the only kind, understanding grown-up around, while Barrymore immediately starts thriving in the presence of an actor who provides her with literally anything to react to.
But again, that's seventy minutes into the movie. Up to that point, Firestarter is almost unwatchably dull. It gets off to a good enough start, leaping right into the chase and then catching us up on the backstory (the book did the same), but that gets us maybe five minutes worth of momentum. There are only so many ways of staging and filming functionally identical scenes of Shop functionaries grumbling too each other; there are only so many ways of framing Keith to look like an exhausted hunted animal and concerned parent. And the filmmakers, under the command of Mark L. Lester (whose career most likely peaked with Class of 1984 in 1982, which is solid exploitation cinema and not really what you'd like to have as a career peak) haven't really tried to exhaust even that limited number of ways. To put it bluntly, Firestarter is a somewhat horrible-looking movie, squandering cinematographer Giuseppe Ruzzolini (a regular collaborator of Pier Paolo Pasolini who'd also worked with Sergio Leone) on a series of images whose flat lighting only serves to accentuate the flat blocking. The movie chokes on a harsh brown-on-brown color scheme that's all wrong for the film stock they were using, which already leeches out color, leading to a film with an unpleasant look that's simultaneously muddy and metallic.
Meanwhile, the plot's lack of any real momentum or development is underscored by what I think must surely be the very worst film score ever composed by Tangerine Dream. I'm well aware that just about every one of the band's soundtracks has its detractors (even the haunting, hallucinatory music they contributed to 1981's Thief, one of my very favorite film scores of the 1980s, was Razzie-nominated), but I'm typically ready and willing to fight on their behalf every time. Not here, though. The music in Firestarter is a disaster, frankly, adding a hazy electronic veneer to material that's in desperate need of being weighted down, not given yet another reason to feel like the movie is floating off. In one particularly awful moment, Tangerine Dream has attempted to write a bit of aw-shucks, Fourth-of-July-and-apple-pie Americana to accompany Andy and Charlie's arrival at the country farmhouse of Irv (Art Carney) and Norma (Louise Fletcher), and those kinds of kitschy corn-pone motifs played on the band's usual set of electronic instruments sounds like an awful parody of a slovenly '80s movie trying to evoke down-home simplicity. Which is, I guess, precisely what this is.
In short, the first half of the film is dire - not on par with the worst of the worst King adaptations, since that gets us down into some truly hellish depths, but surely on par with the worst of the "profoundly mediocre" ones. It improves - a lot, really - when it can find ways to start shunting Keith to the side and relying more on Scott and Barrymore to carry the human emotions of the piece, but it's a long road to get there, and even once it arrives, the question of whether Firestarter at its best is ever more than simply competent enough to be watched once and immediately forgotten remains uncomfortably open. The whole movie lands with a heavy thud, wholly devoid of the sharp paranoid edge that the material demands. The conspiracy is too flatfooted to represent a threat, the heroes too generic to generate any sense of urgency as they run from that conspiracy. And the fire effects are almost all held until the last act, so it's not even terribly effective as a paranormal thriller. It's, if you'll forgive me for saying it, too damp for any sparks to ever catch hold and start burning.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
