A not terrible but mostly forgettable updating and downgrading of the original, to include smartphones and LCD TV (which somehow still have horizontal scan lines and white noise static—the TVs and cell phones both) and which is a downgrade primarily due to the idea that the original didn't benefit very strongly from the involvement of both Spielberg (who I find among the least consistent of the greats, but Poltergeist was one of his better moments) and heavy-hitter Tobe Hooper.

I can see what they were trying to do, and in some ways they succeeded—they came up with new and interesting visuals, and a number of new ideas for things to put the family through, and many of the visual effects are pretty good, something the original occasionally lapsed in. It even had some isolated moments and individual shots that were quite good: In this one, when the souls of dead pour forth from the closet, it's actually a pretty cool visual, as opposed to, say, the giant, the obviously fake marionette mosquito-monster of the original, and when someone has the obligatory gross-out hallucination in the kitchen, we see it reflected not in a mirror but distorted in a reflection on the sink spigot, which was an impressive original twist. Still: it takes more than that.

And, of course, it went to lengths to avoid directly copying the original, which means some scenes here, while not bad by most horror standards, had to stay far away from the original—the face-pulling scene, wthe midnight chicken leg snack scene, and a number of other genius Tobe Hooper touches—which makes for a no-win situation for these filmmakers: how are you going to top those scenes? You'd either have to duplicate them (lame), or, try to write scares better than Tobe Hooper's (not going to happen.)

Aside from the few effective horror images, overally, as a movie, it has none of the directorial excellence and highly competent plotting that saved the original from being the dreadfully hokey film it could so easily have been. And this isn't really hokey, either, nor unwatchable—it's just not particularly good, and remaking a movie like that, it needed to be. Even the usually-excellent Jared Harris (in Zelda Rubenstein's "This House Is Clean" role) can't really elevate it to something memorable.

I don't know, even despite its sporadic failings, the original cast a pretty formidable shadow. Maybe they should have redone "E.T." instead. That might've had room to go in an original enough direction to avoid viewers being unable to escape the direct comparison.