It's the end of the '70s and young bottle specs nerd Arnie is getting bullied at school and bullied at home by his parents. His one friend, one of those nicer sporty alphas that happen, tries to get him out into the world. One day they're driving home and Arnie stops the car. He's seen the wreck of the car we met in the prologue, called Christine after the young family who had her first all died in their own way while on board. But it starts and the grizzled old timer who sells it to him seems glad to see the back of it.
Chrstine likes Arnie plenty, and as he restores her at a local garage, he finds there's a long way she'll go to protect him and serve his interests. Also, he transforms in about a week from awkward nerd to cool young rocker. This gets him the attention of the bad guy who bullied him earlier, whose gang show up to the garage and trash Christine in a frenzied assault. Seems like an act of war, to me.
There is signature synthesised scoring and an overall craft on show but this never feels like a John Carpenter film. Fresh from the extraordinary streak from Halloween to The Thing, Carpenter had forged an instantly recognisable style of lean and mean narrative characters that swing from cartoonish action figures to people with depth and homebaked music that any filmmaker would happily add to a film. But Christine feels like a job rather than a chance to tackle a Stephen King story and have the high box office potential after The Thing had bombed (before it's real life on home video began, of course).
And this is a very King story with staple bullies, magic and Americana coming out of its ears. At first, when you understand this and know the context, you might make the obvious comparison with David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone, also dominated by its author's influence with a sparse film auteur's voice left in the mix. Both films work a treat, whoever's work they resemble, but I wonder if they'd swapped assignments would they have made films closer to their output. The scene that suggests this more than any is when Christine, battered and barely alive, rejuvenates herself in a show of dazzling practical effects work. Cronenberg was the car guy, after all (his other forgotten movie is Fast Company). But then, nah, both films form that blindspot that every director has at the beginning of their career when choices are made for career over their supposed lifelong vision. I'll never judge any artist who opts for a bread and butter project when that's the income and exposure they can use. Then again, do we rate Guillermo Del Toro by Blade II or Pan's Labyrinth?
One of the aspects of this film that always suggest how jobbing it is is the transformation of Arnie. The speed and profundity of his galloping confidence and arrogance are so marked that the idea is that this metamorphosis is driven by the supernatural force of Christine herself. When Arnie is examining the wreckage left by the gang he notes the movement in the car and, through his connection, takes an audience's position before saying: "Show me." This sets off the self reconstruction at the centre of the effects in this effects dependent film but also forms a point of no return. That might well be when he remember how little cost or struggle there was in Arnie's character change. Is this Carpenter saying, "hell, let's just get him alpha" and rely on some scenes of vestigial puerility to mark depth. The rest of it is pretty much mechanical in both a figurative and physical sense.
Well, there's a lot going on here to satisfy the quest for theme for those who will. There's the outright entertainment value of it that makes its screentime fly by. And it you didn't know it was John Carpenter making it while still in the first brilliant phase of this career you wouldn't need to. I suppose I just miss the mix of crafty cinema made within genre by a crafty cinephile who at his best (which is a long rap sheet) could always add originality. Is this film another proof of the Stephen King curse (that he kills auteurism)? The Shining alone challenges that but, then, that was Kubrick. There's too much variation in the time since, anyway. It's much more like a sharp artist clocking in. And when it's a still young John Carpenter doing that I can think of a queue as long as a city block that wouldn't show up with this kind of energy.
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