Firestarter (2022)
Directed by Keith Thomas
No — Firestarter is not woke, scoring 12 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Firestarter arrives as the second adaptation of Stephen King's 1980 novel, following the 1984 version that nobody has defended with much vigor in the intervening decades.
Consciousness Markers
The cast is notably diverse, with Michael Greyeyes (Indigenous) as Rainbird and Gloria Reuben and John Beasley in supporting roles, but this diversity is presented naturally without any thematic comment.
The antagonist Hollister is a deliberate gender-swap of the original film's male character, and Charlie is a powerful young female lead, but neither element carries an explicit feminist message.
There are no LGBTQ+ characters, relationships, or themes anywhere in the film.
The film engages with no racial themes or commentary; minority characters exist in the story without any racial framing.
There is no environmental or climate-related content in the film.
The villain is a shadowy government agency, not a capitalist or corporate target; no eat-the-rich messaging is present.
The film contains no body-positivity themes or messaging.
Charlie's anger issues and mood swings are explicitly caused by her pyrokinesis, not framed as neurodivergence or a neurodiversity narrative.
The film is a supernatural fiction with no historical subject matter to revise.
The film is a straightforward genre thriller with no preachy or didactic messaging.
Why it received this score
Firestarter arrives as the second adaptation of Stephen King's 1980 novel, following the 1984 version that nobody has defended with much vigor in the intervening decades. Keith Thomas directs with the solemn efficiency of a man completing a contractual obligation. Zac Efron plays a father with telepathy and bleeding eyes. His daughter Charlie, played by Ryan Kiera Armstrong, can set things on fire when she gets upset, which is inconvenient for everyone involved. A shadowy federal agency wants her. The agency sends a bounty hunter. Things burn. The reviews were unkind, and the box office was worse. This is a film that exists, and that is close to the most generous thing we can say about it.
The cultural accounting here is modest. The cast is notably diverse, with Michael Greyeyes as the bounty hunter Rainbird and Gloria Reuben as the agency captain, but the film never pauses to comment on any of it. They are simply present, doing their jobs. The antagonist Hollister has been gender-swapped from the original, and Charlie is a girl with world-ending power, though neither choice is pressed into service as a statement. The film has no interest in lecturing us about race, class, the climate, or the body. Its villain is a government agency, which is a time-honored target and not a corporate one. There is no messaging to be found. The fire is just fire.
A genre exercise remains, and it mostly goes through the motions. It is competently assembled and utterly weightless, a film that wants to be a thriller and settles for being a delivery mechanism for a release date. We have seen this before, done better, and we will see it again. The embers cool quickly. There is no sermon here, no cause, no grand statement about the way we live now. Just a girl, a flame, and a studio hoping the algorithm does the rest. It does not.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Part of
Synopsis
For more than a decade, parents Andy and Vicky have been on the run, desperate to hide their daughter Charlie from a shadowy federal agency that wants to harness her unprecedented gift for creating fire into a weapon of mass destruction. Andy has taught Charlie how to defuse her power, which is triggered by anger or pain. But as Charlie turns 11, the fire becomes harder and harder to control. After an incident reveals the family's location, a mysterious operative is deployed to hunt down the family and seize Charlie once and for all. Charlie has other plans.
Questions about Firestarter
Is Firestarter woke?
No — Firestarter is not woke, scoring 12 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does Firestarter have any woke elements?
1 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Representation Casting (30). On Representation Casting: The cast is notably diverse, with Michael Greyeyes (Indigenous) as Rainbird and Gloria Reuben and John Beasley in supporting roles, but this diversity is presented naturally without any thematic comment.
How does Firestarter compare to other 2022 movies?
It ranks #136 of the 223 films from 2022 we've scored; their average is 22. The wokest is Bros (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.