Sight Unseen: An Ignorant Plot Synopsis of Firestarter (2022)

 

 DISCLAIMER: I have not seen the film.  This synopsis is merely my best guess, based off of the trailer and my flabbergasted intellect. 

Charlie is a young girl, and her father Andy knows how to sing.  He also is obsessed with being a pit master and BBQing his way into history.  As he levels up, he wants to make this a daddy-daughter project.  Charlie is kind of into it, but she would rather be thinking about boys on bikes circling her.  One day, while at the county BBQ Festival, Charlie is burnt by a radio-active 40,000 BTU Broil King Signet 390.  

Now she has started to develop the power to BBQ anything with just a single thought.  Andy and his wife Vicky constantly talk about Charlie and how people will want to capture and cage her when they find out the powers she wields.  She can create searing heat, but that annoys Andy.  He believes in The Brisket of Baskerville thought experiment that supposes slow and low cooking with alternating temperatures as the ultimate form of outdoor cooking.  Charlie must learn how to control her BBQ powers so that meats with fatty deposits can be treated with the required respect of a longer cooking process.

One day at school she freaks out when she is taking inventory of what she has on her desk.  She includes her shoes in this mental exercise and loses her crap because the shoes are on her feet and not on her desk.  The power of the broil starts to become uncontrollable, and she flees to the washroom without asking permission from the teacher.  Enraged, the teach follows her and catches Charlie pre-heating a toilet stall.  The secret is now out.

A secret organization of people, headed up by Aaron Franklin of Franklin BBQ in Austin, Texas, know that this power must be captured and harnessed.  The people at the top of the BBQ world know that if her powers fall into the wrong hands meat will forever be dry and chewy.

Needing information, one character decides to visit The Google Character of the film, the person who will give all of the answers in one or two big exposition dumps.  He tells this lady that Charlie's powers are indeed as cool and awesome as people fear, and that if she isn't properly taught about optimal internal cooking temperatures she may end up going too far and create a nuclear explosion.

Bad people from a prepackaged marinade company track Charlie down to where she lives.  They have guns, because why not?  She runs away, and her dad gets a bump on the head from the back end of a gun.  Pissed off, she sets her mom's arms on fire.  Instead of losing her crap because of the intense heat, Vicky just stands still and nags her husband to come and put out the flames, because when people are on fire they don't freak out and run around trying to put it out.

Retreating to the woods, Charlie instantly BBQs a crow with just her thoughts, and understands the great power she has.  Returning home, she finally gets what she's always wanted.  Three boys on bikes ride around her in a circle.  Hot-dang, could this day get any better?  It really doesn't, because now she's set on BBQing people instead of butchered meat products.

An Informative Aside: The original title of the Stephen King book that this film is based off of was BarBeCutie.  The publisher was releasing some vegan cookbooks and didn't want to send mixed messages, so they requested a title change.  They also suggested that this may be a little too violent of a story, and asked if perhaps Charlie held only the power of a pellet smoker or maybe an offset smoker.  However, King was in the midst of freaking out over how good grilled hotdogs were and refused to water down his wicked cool idea.