In name only

Rating: 1/10 (7 July 2019)

The original source material was let down by verbosity and a poor ending but the heart of the story remains solid, one of King's best. What was required was a suitable medium to play out the backstory of these characters, to get to the real heart of the novel. Surely a miniseries would have been the way to go? Ramming everything into two hours, the filmmakers made only token reference to the novel and then made the rest up as they went along. The result is a movie played for jump scares and characters so rushed and faceless, it's hard to tell who is who. Another issue is switching the timeline from the late fifties to the late eighties. What, people nowadays wouldn't be able to reference the fifties? Or is this a sop to the Stranger Things demographic? Everything I enjoyed in the book: the sense of time and place, the dialogue, Mike's relationship with his father, the underground clubhouse and smoke ritual, hell, nearly all the activities that bonded the kids together... all that was jettisoned. What's left is just a so-so jump scares horror movie for people with either an aversion to plot or with attention deficit disorder. So for anyone who read the book beforehand, you are gonna be disappointed. Terrible stuff and worse, profitable. This will probably lead others to take a similar approach, sadly enough.