K-SCORE: 48
Director: Andy Muschietti
Writer: Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, Gary Dauberman
Based on: It by Stephen King
Starring: Bill Skarsgard, Jaeden Lieberher, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Sophia Lillis, Finn Wolfhard, Wyatt Oleff, Chosen Jacobs, Jack Dylan Grazer, Nicholas Hamilton, Jackson Robert Scott
Spoiler Level: Minor
Bad title. It doesn't even follow.
I can’t understand the flood of paranormal horror. I personally prefer slasher, or better yet, beast, but those seem to be getting rarer and rarer, as more and more haunted, creepy, jumpscare-riddled shit about small towns and small town people comes out every year. It is better than a lot of the crap I’ve come to expect from this subgenre, but it’s still really bad. The sound design is as manipulative as ever. The behavior of the characters doesn’t make sense. The nature of the villain is nonspecific and the assumptions that the heroes make regarding how to thwart this villain are huge. It’s plot wanders because the creators clearly cared more about making certain scenes, designing and executing certain horror moments that they wanted in the finished product, than they did about cohesion. One can’t track the position of Pennywise, for example, nor could one pin down his powers, what’s real about him and what’s not. Several times throughout the film, but most notably with the bloody bathroom, characters experience different versions of reality, and never is it actually ironed out what really happened and what didn’t. This would be acceptable in a story that’s purposefully fucking with your mind, trying to get you to sort it out as the characters are, but It is about children coming together to face their fears not the horror associated with a descent into insanity. It needs every second it can get to flesh out this ensemble too because there are seven relevant good-guy kids, three villainous kids, two missing kids, three awful adults, and Pennywise - a huge group that could never develop effectively in two hours - yet it wastes precious moments on needless backstory for the town’s terrible accident and 27 year cycle of disappearances. I’m sure it does this because Stephen King wrote that in the source material, but here it adds nothing except for people that are huge fans of the book. And I don't know who those people are. Clowns aren’t really that scary. They’re just fucking stupid.