It came from beneath my expectations

Rating: 5/10 (16 March 2020)

I've always been a bit sour grapes about King since he seems to be everywhere: every award list, every internet top 10, every bookshelf of people who say they like this genre...
It's tempting to make some joke about this being a remake of the Clara Bow vehicle but I can't think of a good one. I hate it when people don't research what titles have already been used. I guess this movie is actually "It: Chapter 1" according to its credits.
I tried to go into this with an open mind. I haven't the book but I want to give whoever is responsible props for adapting it, not only in two parts, but for dedicating each part to a particular time period. I find that 90% of the time when a story keeps switching between two time periods it would have been so much better if it had just stayed in the past. I found this to be the case with Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia", the recent "Hill House" Adaptation and a little known book called "Blood Sinister". One really good example however is Isao Takahata's wonderful mangamation "Only Yesterday".
But now to review the actual movie. This is one of those pictures that always seems to be teetering on the edge of being a classic of its kind. There's a ton of evident professionalism in how it's realized, in the camera work, the special effects, the locations etc. Story-wise too, I can really feel what this could have been: an epic story of friendship and facing your fears against a formidable villain.
To try and pinpoint the negatives to one thing, I suppose it's all about judging the tone. From the first scene I said to myself that I would not watch it as a horror movie anymore, I'd just watch it as an adventure like Gremlins or Jumanji, where it's all about the seen, not the unseen since they really blow their load very quickly with that paper boat and drain scene. And I was fine with this.
With this movie they so could have been a chilling film with strange imagery and building tension or else have gone the other way and just been a goofy, zainy movie like an R rated Roger Rabbit (which was actually pretty terrifying in a PG remember). But what we get is an unhappy medium of a movie that can't quite seem to make its mind up on what kind of feel it wants. Contrastive moods and tones in different scenes, including a well judged use of mood whiplash can be effective but for whatever reason, the terror elements and the more in-your-face elements basically cancel each other out so you can't really enjoy either, not even as a horror comedy.
One reason is Pennywise himself. He looks terrible. In the bad way. I used to be really freaked out by clowns but he is such a Scooby-Doo-esque vision of the creepy clown he feels like he belongs in a comedy parodying the scary clown trope. If he had looked like a sincere attempt at a clown that you might really find in at a preschooler's party then he would have looked more terrifying. There's something especially chilling about something about something which clearly isn't trying to scare you but which you clearly should be scared of. Tall order to create I know... At least he's very well acted and has tons of charisma.
The human element is frequently charming, cute and engaging. Every character feels well thought out and the whole is just one long nostalgia trip about one strange but beautiful summer of self-discovery, due in no short part to Molly Ringwald Junior (I totally called her out on that before the character did). I hear in the book she gets a bit more jiggy with it. There is no cowardice worse than keeping cool stuff in the book out of the movie.
When we see these characters integrated into the actual plot, that's when the stuffing starts to show. These horror movies that are themselves about fear are always taking a big risk. They can indeed be powerful stories that help us look into ourselves or just lazy, portentous claptrap. Perhaps a lot of meaning and nuance got lost in adaptation; I've listened to the first chapter of the book and boy does ol' Stevie lay it on thick with the narration. Sample: "it was something your Mom said to you, not your brother" SHOW DON'T TELL!
You can feel the picture sagging beneath the weight of it's own ambition. Elements like slaughtering the cattle, the fire, the licentious father and the stammering don't really seem to go anywhere and ultimately the whole narrative seems to abandon all the philosophical threads it seems to want to establish and the last act is all about the strictly material struggle against not-Tim Curry.
On another note, am I dumb or was anyone else confused about the rules here? Is Pennywise Tangible? Is he vulnerable to physical attacks? He seems to morph and teleport and conjure up visions as freely as Uncle Grampa. He feels super powerful and then suddenly very mortal. It made it very hard to keep emotionally involved with the action.
And also that stammering kid was such a sanctimonious..the kid with the glasses was my favourite.
But there are a lot of kooky images and nifty sequences if you just make no effort at all to follow what the context is.
I feel like we missed out on a real classic of it's kind; a unique hybrid of horror, a philosophical novel and bildungsroman all because of a complacent approach to the writing.