The newest adaptation of the Stephen King novel It comes from director Andy Muschietti, whose only previous feature was the 2013 horror film Mama starring Jessica Chastain.
I had high hopes for this due to the good reviews, but I was mostly disappointed. My main issue was that I didn’t take Pennywise seriously as a villain, partly due to the overuse of noticeable CGI that looked like it might have needed some more work and unfortunately made those scenes feel silly. On top of that, while I do find clowns creepy in real life, they are too goofy to be effective horror antagonists for me. However, if you are scared of clowns, I wouldn’t be shocked if this movie terrifies you.
All this isn’t to say the costume design and makeup for Pennywise was bad, those aspects of his character were about as scary as they could be. And actor Bill Skarsgard from Atomic Blonde and Hemlock Grove certainly does as well as he can portraying Pennywise and his acting is never what’s silly about the character. He avoids going over the top which would have been very easy to do with such a role.
The film also relies heavily on jump scares that you can almost always see coming and end up feeling rather rote.
It is much better when just showing the kids hanging out with each other, as they all give great performances and the characters are well-written, 3-dimensional, and varied. With kid characters, it’s easy to fall in the trap of just writing stereotypes, but they manage to avoid that here. These scenes are really fun and should be nostalgic for people that grew up in the 80s. They just aren’t good enough to outweigh the boring nature of the supposedly scary parts. I also felt like the score was a bit overwrought and tried too hard to make the audience feel scared.
I especially liked the performance of Finn Wolfhard, who showed how versatile of an actor he is with a brash, crude character that’s far from who he plays on Stranger Things.
This film is only part one of a planned two movie series, with the second half going to be about the sections in the novel when the Loser’s Club is all grown up. Despite this, it’s a complete story and doesn’t feel like it’s only the first half a larger plot. And the novel is over a thousand pages, so it’s probably for the best not to try to tell all of that in one movie.
My disappointment in the movie seems to put me in the minority. Right now, 88% of critics on Rotten Tomatoes have given it a positive review and it has an 8.4 out of 10 on IMDB. It’s also doing fantastic at the box office, making 13.5 million on its opening Thursday alone and then a massive $51 million on Friday. According to Variety, it’s on track to break multiple opening weekend records, such as for R-rated films, movies released in September, and the highest grossing opening for a horror film. It was tracking at an opening around $60 or $70 million but now looks like it will break $100 million.
This was a much-needed boost for the box office, which had a disappointing summer financially, with the last month or so being especially bad.
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