I've seen Firestarter and it's really forgettable. Zac Efron is really bad and barely shows any emotion throughout the movie. There is a scene involving a cat that is one of the stupidest things I've seen in a while.
But, surprise to me that John Carpenter and his crew do the soundtrack and absolutely kill it. On par with his recent Halloween soundtracks and maybe even better. The score elevates the movie and is the most memorable thing here. I also liked Michael Greyeyes as John Rainbird despite the baffling direction they take the character.
This, all this. The Carpenters score was the absolute highlight for sure. The rest of everything else was pretty bad for all the reasons stated. They ended up taking some significant umbrage with the original storylines and characters, that's for sure. That cat scene actually pissed me off and upset me to a certain level, seemed really inhumane and out of place, just seemed like a nasty scene that didn't need to be there. Also the bad CGI in this....wowsars!
I will say the remake felt more horrorish than the original though, that's about as much of a praise I can give it really. But it wasnt in any way a real improvement over the original, which was pretty fuckin terrible up until the third act, with Drew going HAM on mofos everywhere. Tonally speaking, the original was weird and the remake was even weirder. The Rainbird character was so significantly different in the remake (and the ending was as well) but that may have been the most positive shift between the two films actually, as the original role was completely changed. While George C Scott had a wild and memorable performance in the original, I found his role very creepy to say the least, the interactions between him and Barrymore were very unsettling at times in a pedophile type of way.
Again yet another example of a remake that isn't better than the original (which already was a low fucking bar) and a total waste of time to have produced in the first place. I do wonder if there was some rights issues like Harley said that forced the studio to churn out this shit.