IT (2017) - Review

It

Drama/Horror
2 hours and 15 minutes
Rated: R

Written by: Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, and Gary Dauberman
Directed by: Andy Muschietti
Produced by: Seth Grahame-Smith, David Katzenberg, Roy Lee, Dan Lin, and Barbara Muschietti

Cast:
Jaeden Lieberher
Jeremy Ray Taylor
Sophia Lillis
Finn Wolfhard
Chosen Jacobs
Jack Dylan Grazer
Wyatt Oleff
Bill Skarsgård

You'll float too.

Twenty-seven years ago, Halloween III: Season of the Witch director Tommy Lee Wallace gave audiences the very first onscreen adaptation of Stephen King's gargantuan novel It by way of a two-part miniseries on the ABC network. The miniseries was deeply flawed and strayed in a number of ways from the source material, but with its inclusion of an iconic performance of Tim Curry as Pennywise the Dancing Clown and with the fact that so many kids and adolescents saw the miniseries when it aired - Wallace's adaptation has since gone on to develop a cult following (not unlike his entry in the Halloween franchise). With the return of the creature occurring every twenty-seven years, now in 2017 it only made sense for money-hungry producers to consider readapting King's grand novel, but this time for the cinema. And why not? As stated, Wallace's miniseries was flawed in major ways. This time, it seemed, audiences would be given a much truer adaptation of King's novel based on what was seen in trailers and discussed in interviews. So how did they do?

The story only follows the heroes, the Losers' Club, as they are children, ignoring the events of the novel where these characters are adults since that storyline will be developed later into a second It film. This was admittedly not a bad decision since the cinematic medium wouldn't be able to encapsulate the story of King's novel in its entirety without being well over six hours in length (a rough but probably honest estimate). The kids' storyline has been transposed from the original setting of the 1950s to the late-1980s. This is of course so that the producers and director Andy Muschietti can set the second film in the present day. This transposition of decades in no way affects the storyline in any damning or compelling way. Conversations of rock and roll that were present within the book have now been shifted to other music relevant to the era such as one character's secret obsession with the band New Kids On the Block. Again, the creative choice in the end perhaps only serves as a benefit to make the film relatable to audience members who also grew up in the late-1980s.

The film is photographed by cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung who does an intriguing job of casting an overall sense of darkness throughout the film. Moments set during daylight seem to have a desaturation about them, voiding the image of a great deal of its vibrancy. And sequences shot in the dark are dismally bleak and gray, giving the image a washed-out quality entirely. While this may take the eyes a second to adjust to, it's an effective way to shoot the film considering that the fictional town of Derry, which the film is set in, is meant to always have this cloud of dread hanging over it created by the creature that is Pennywise. By removing the brightness completely from the images, Chung has captured that cloud magnificently through the captured images on the screen.

The performances within It are the film's real show stoppers. The members of the Losers' Club do a great job with the material at hand and in many ways do capture the characters that King had initially put down on the page. Obviously the biggest standout, however, is Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. What Skarsgård manages to do with the role hits so much closer to what was on the page than what Tim Curry had done with it. That's not to write off Curry's performance in anyway, but in moments where Curry went for the silly and over-the-top stylings he is known best for, Skarsgård restrains himself. His Pennywise comes across very childlike with its one track mind, and yet one always sees the heart of the monster lurking behind his wandering eyes, waiting for its moment to strike and kill. The sequence occurring within the first ten minutes between Skarsgård and Jackson Robert Scott is unnervingly terrifying. Skarsgård conveys more through his eyes and drooling lips alone than most actors can deliver in a full bodied performance and it is truly a wonder to see.

All of this considered, It - like its 1990 made-for-television predecessor - is an enormously flawed movie. The previously mentioned sequence between Skarsgård and Scott is undermined by a particularly hokey use of CGI. Unfortunately, many - if not most - of the scare moments throughout the movie are undermined by the rubbery CGI utilized to capture them. This is problematic because knowing this monster is a shapeshifter means there understandably had to be moments within the film where CGI came into play, but the movie relies on it too heavily throughout and it becomes more of a distraction than a tool to aid in the fear. Perhaps someone should have showed director Andy Muschietti John Carpenter's The Thing so that he could have seen that it is entirely possible to make a great and terrifying movie about a shapeshifting creature effectively through practical effects work instead of CGI.

But It's biggest and most damning problem comes out of its direction. Muschietti has ultimately traded character development for scares. The film follows the formula of a few minutes of dialogue, then a scare sequence, then a few more minutes of dialogue, and a new scare sequence, all the way until the film's big confrontation between the Losers and Pennywise in the third act. This is a problem because we lose moments where character development really could have helped this movie shine. With King's novel clocking in at nearly 1200 pages in length, it makes sense to cut much of the character development, but not all of it entirely. The bully character Henry Bowers's rage at the Losers is something that could have easily been explained in a sentence of dialogue, but it is gone entirely from this movie. Certain Loser's backstories are either entirely gone too, are mixed together with the stories of other characters present in King's novel, or are handled so briskly that we barely get a chance to learn who our heroes are. This doesn't allow us as an audience to connect to all seven of these heroes the way that we should to really genuinely care or believe in them by the film's climax. By adding a rift in the group in the film's second act, Muschietti isn't doing anything to help the storyline either. In King's novel these were characters who would die for one another if it came to such drastic means. In Muschietti's film, one doesn't get the impression that that is the case.

By trading character development for scares, Muschietti creates another problem as well. It's monster movie textbook 101 to show as little of the monster as possible, leaving much to the imagination of the film's audience. Muschietti doesn't do that. In almost every scare sequence, Skarsgård shows up in his Pennywise attire. While his acting allows this to be frightening for the first several of these moments, before the movie has even reached its halfway mark, the audience has seen Pennywise so much he has lost nearly all of the frightening mystery that was present in the very first sequence. The film's final confrontation between Pennywise and the Losers suffers the hardest from all of this. It's hard to care about the Losers because we haven't spent enough time with them and their stories to develop the necessary level of interest, and it's hard to be intimidated by Pennywise because we've seen so much of him throughout the movie, leading to some painfully bad, if not unintentionally laughable, moments in what is meant to be the film's epic confrontation of a climax.

Despite its amazing performances and its dreary cinematography, It is a film that ultimately suffers from its directorial choices to trade character development for scare sequences. With the continual use of blatantly distracting CGI and the ever damning decision to show the monster at every scare, the movie fails to live up to both the hype it generated prior to its release, as well as King's masterwork novel.

4.5/10