Another version of the film adaptation of Stephen King's novel of the same just came out. I had not seen a trailer and was only vaguely aware it was a thing until it showed up in my local theaters.

It's basically Stephen King with his rather glaring issues with women, especially wives and mothers, sitting down and saying "What if Carrie had a dad?" Charlie is a little girl born with vast psychic powers, most notably, pyrokinesis, which term, I believe, originated (or at least was disseminated on a large scale) in this novel. Flashbacks reveal that her parents gained minor psychic abilities from an experimental drug in college, which have been passed on, Lamarckian fashion to their daughter, except at much higher abilities. Vicky and Andy, the parents, have differing views on the family's abilities, Vicky refusing to acknowledge her own talents, but insisting that Charlie needs to be trained, while Andy, who uses his own to earn a living, teaches Charlie to suppress her powers for her own safety and those of others. They are in agreement that they have to keep their abilities a secret to prevent Charlie's abuse or exploitation by the government agency which ran the experiments in the first place, so they live largely unplugged from the rest of the world, and moving around. Except the movie needs a plot, so the government comes after Charlie, deploying an elite operative, an Indian named Rainbird, after the family.

I have only the vaguest memory of the prior film, with Davd Keith, Heather Locklear & Drew Barrymore as the family & George C Scott as Rainbird, so I can't really compare the adaptations. This version, featuring a mostly unknown cast, with the biggest names being Zach Efron as Andy and Kurtwood Smith as the lead scientist, while sticking fairly close to the spirit of the book, apparently seems to have decided to severely truncate the plot. Most notably, where Rainbird in the books is only called in after several disastrous efforts to apprehend the family, he is their hunter from the outset in this film. This is an issue because Rainbird forms a rapport with Charlie in the book which his actions in the film would prevent, but they still attempt to bring this about, even buffing his capabilities and trying to portray him as a fellow victim of the agency, and in my opinion, ultimately failing at earning his bond with Charlie. The character struggles of Andy and Charlie are largely muted, although Vicky gets a bit more to do, there isn't much significant change there either. The film is basically a truncated action story. It's a child's power fantasy definitely not written for children (gun and flame-violence, no se, but not exactly featuring an empowered protagonist for adolescent or adult readers to identify with. You could care about Charlie and her parents through their interiority in the books (where the chief scientist gives the parents props for successfully raising Charlie as much and as well as they did), whereas here, they mainly serve to debate and then command Charlie is the use of her powers, culminating in a moment that is just not believable, especially when the concurrent Dr. Strange film features a much better example of a climax where an adult male mentor encourages a powerful juvenile female to 'win' the day (I suspect, like Charlie's parents, Dr Strange owes his powers considerably to hallucinogenic experimentation, albeit in a Doylist, rather than Watsonian sense). It feels like they tried super-hard to get this one down to 90 minutes, at considerable cost to story and characters.