IT (2017) - Review
Originally published August, 2018Stephen King's IT is one of the most recognizable horror movies of the past 30 years. However, that isn't to say it's very good. The original, made-for-TV horror movie, starring Tim Curry, benefits a great deal from nostalgia and from the fact that Tim Curry is having a grand time playing Pennywise, the shape-shifting clown that eats children. It's a needlessly long movie that isn't scary and has not aged well, outside the moments with Curry and some neat practical effects. It also came out about 30 years ago. This means it's time for a remake to capitalize on the budding nostalgia of people who saw it back in the 80s at a young age and were traumatized enough to become fans.
Having finally seen the new remake for myself, I'd say that some of the same flaws are still present, along with some new ones. However, if this were the only IT movie to exist, it wouldn't be a bad thing. In fact, I think this a much better movie, overall, rendering the existence of the original somewhat pointless, other than as a 3+ hour Tim Curry highlight reel.
Pros
Bill Skarsgard's Pennywise is off-putting and creepy in all the right ways; a killer smile
Acting from most of the children is pretty good, when it's not over-the-top
Good of use of makeup and special effects that are not super reliant on CGI
Creepy moments with particular adults are just as unsettling as with Pennywise
Some funny moments sprinkled in
Some characters are well-developed and interesting
Cons
Slow-moving with some unnecessary plot points
Loooooong
Some characters are woefully underdeveloped in comparison to others, despite their importance in the end
Reliant on some lame horror tropes and clichés
When it goes over-the-top, it realllllly goes over the top with some hammy acting
Some dialogue is a little too on-the-nose, especially when it's trying to be funny
Really trying hard with the nostalgia
Inaccuracies in its history (Lethal Weapon 2 did not come out in June of '89)
Plot & Thoughts
A group of high school kids in a small town in Maine during the late 1980s all have a couple of things in common: they're social outcasts and they're experiencing some nightmarish hallucinations. At first, they're all doing their own thing, with the exception of the three main boys and their friend: Bill, Eddie, Richie, and Stanley. Bill is haunted by the disappearance of his younger brother and is determined to find out what happened to him. Eddie is a fast-talking hypochondriac with asthma. Richie is a foul-mouthed goof whose inappropriate jokes tend to bomb more than hit. Stanley is the fourth musketeer in the group at the start of the movie, but he's mostly underdeveloped as just the quiet Jewish boy who has to prepare for his Bar Mitsva and has a fear of a painting in his house. Eventually, Ben, the overweight bookworm with a secret crush joins the group, along with his crush Beverly, who has a strained relationship with her father for obvious reasons. The final outcast to join the group is Mike, who we are introduced to early on, but is almost absent for the first half of the movie.
They all have a common antagonistic relationship with the neighborhood bully and his friends, whose actions are far more absurdly psychotic than your regular after-school bully, even by movie standards. Through the common relationship they all share and the mystery of the disappearing children of the neighborhood, the gang of "losers" come together to face the growing threat of Pennywise, the creepy clown who haunts them. It may seem from this description that a majority of the movie's plot is a coming of age story. However, it's more of a 50/50 split between that and Pennywise just creeping about doing his best to scare them so he can feed on their fear before he eats them.
I'm not really a fan of the original IT, nor have I ever found clowns to be inherently scary. If this were your first exposure to clowns, though, I would be willing to accept it as justification for the phobia. The film's direction, Skarsgard, and the special effects do a lot to make Pennywise a truly diabolical and monstrous threat. I would argue that, while I love Tim Curry's Pennywise, his was more clown than monster. Skarsgard is definitely more monster than clown here. There are some great moments that involve inhuman contortion, or his creepy facial expressions that skirt the line of the uncanny valley, or just some jittery special effects that affect how he moves on-screen that just make Pennywise a monstrous creature. Normally, I'd say it would be better to take the Babadook approach and leave everything vague and off-screen if you want to make something scary, but this goes for it in ways that I respect and appreciate.
The film is at its best when Pennywise is somewhere close by and at its worst when it's attempting to characterize its rather large cast of kids by only focusing on a few of them. It just makes the whole journey take a lot longer. Of the 6 main kids, we spend most of if our time with Bill and Beverly. They end up being the most developed by the end with some pretty clear motivations and demons to work through. The others don't quite get as much attention, other than the fast-talking hypochondriac, whose mother's fat suit makes her look like she's hiding a bunch of tissue paper under her dress. Ben, Stanley, and Richie all have a bunch of details to describe them, but their motivations and struggles are not nearly as flushed out. And poor Mike, who has some pretty distinct demons in comparison to other kids in the group, is not part of the group until more than half of the movie is done. You almost wonder if they were thinking of cutting the character at the last minute.
It all gets a bit disjointed in some ways, like there was some confusion about where the focus of the story needed to be. I get the impression that they set out with the goal of developing every character, but then backtracked when they saw how much longer the movie would be, and it's already over 2 hours. The movie wanted to make the friendship with these kids seem more real and genuine, which it does achieve to a certain degree, but that just means it takes a lot longer for it to fully transition from a coming-of-age story to horror. It would have been better off if a few more of them had started out in the group instead of joining one by one, just for the sake of cutting out some extra time.
The last character of significance in the story is Henry, the mullet-wearing bully. This guy is so over-the-top in his performance, I was almost laughing at it. Rather than going with subtlety as the method of pushing this boy's mind over the edge into becoming Pennywise's Renfield, he's already teetering on the brink of insanity, chasing kids down and cutting them up with his knife. There's some level of bullying that would go unnoticed, but I find it hard to believe this kid would get away with it in the 80's, even with his dad as a local cop.
Speaking of the 80's, IT is trying really hard to capture that nostalgia. With how it has the tendency to suddenly shift in tone and become an adolescent movie from that era, like Stand By Me (another King story), I couldn't help but get the impression that this was trying to eat some of Stranger Things' lunch. The big negative I have towards attempts at using nostalgia is that it can across as cheap, lazy, and pointless; it's as though viewers expected to be so dumb that they'll just become giddy with nostalgia and love the movie because of a New Kids on the Block reference. It looks even worse when they can't get the dates right for these historical details they've deliberately placed in the background.
The positive to making this a more 80s-style horror movie is that they're at least using more makeup and practical/special effects to get the job done. There is still CGI, but it is more subtle and takes a back seat to other effects that look great and work really well. It's small stuff like how Pennywise's eyes can roll back, or how he moves and jitters across the room, or how he can come out of a small box and twist his body around in a contorted and impossible manner. There are computer-generated effects there, but it's subdued enough that you don't quite notice it. There are certainly moments when it does not look great, but thankfully, those are less frequent and brief.
TL;DR (Conclusion)
The 2017 remake IT is a creepy movie that makes the monster clown scary in some new ways and manages to do so with significant use of special effects that aren't entirely reliant on CGI. It gets bogged down trying to do too many things at once. It also is plagued by nostalgia and the occasional hammy performance. However, IT is mostly a success at making a good horror movie with some memorable scenes and creepy moments that were reminiscent of the horror classics of the era it was trying to capture.
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