I don’t understand why everyone is going crazy over the new It movie. The newest adaptation of Stephen King’s novel sans Tim Curry was well-shot and entertaining, but it is crazy to give it a 9.2. I’m not a huge fan of horror movies, I saw Chuckie as a kid and I’ve been terrified of the genre ever since, but my girlfriend likes horror movies. She’s a King fanatic who constantly tries to get me to read his work even though I’m much too big of a wuss to even open up the front cover of his giant tomes. In middle school, she read It for the first time and she couldn’t sleep properly for months. This movie has been on the top of her to-do list ever since the trailer was released, hours before the showing she could barely even speak. When I got the text from my pharmacist saying It “was so gooood” I sucked up my pride and got as ready as I was ever going to be.
We arrived at the Alamo Drafthouse with literal minutes to spare, my girlfriend reminding me the entire ride that if we missed the movie she’d be tying red balloons to everything in my apartment. It was the first horror movie I’ve watched this decade (besides Cabin In The Woods, but that’s more of a comedy) and I can say I enjoyed myself. Bill Skarsgard gives an amazing performance as nightmare fuel, giving each one of his movements fluidity. He didn’t just walk, he moved his arms and dropped his massive clown feet, popping in and out of scenes before munching on faces. The kids were alright, I find child actors annoying most of the time and even Finn Wolfhard’s massive amounts of f-bombs couldn’t change that.
There will be It spoilers:
After two boozy milkshakes and two and a half hours, I asked her what she thought about the movie. As a true King fan, she felt it strayed too far from the original and held off on putting in some of the best parts (a.k.a. the monsters.) There was no werewolf in a letterman’s jacket, no creepy mask in the woods and no moving Paul Bunyan statue, though we do see it for a brief second. Thankfully they did omit the really unfortunate sex scene at the end of the It novel that MoviePilot described as “too controversial for an R-Rated film.”
There were also a ton of unfortunate plot holes that the books patched up. The original book was set in the 1950s, but the movie decided that the 1980s would be a better fit. The director really wanted you to get a Stranger Things vibe off of what you saw, giving audiences that sense of nostalgia that drove the Netflix original series to superstardom. They wanted It ’s next cycle to take place in 2018 and whenever you change a story for marketing reasons rather than to supplement the story, you’re going to end up with something messy.
The ending of the movie was where things really got ridiculous. Why would beating up a monster that lives off fear with pipes do anything? Without fear to feed on, it has to fall away into the darkness, even though it still has a full floating army of kids hovering just a few feet above it’s head? In the book, all those kids are slaughtered like lambs but I guess a movie executive thought that would be too “cruel.”
It didn’t change my life, but it’s solid cinematography and passable monster made it a solid C+ movie. To my girlfriend, it was just another mediocre Stephen King movie adaptation.
