Good, but not great.

Rating: 7/10 (2 October 2017)

I am a huge fan of the book, and wasn't disappointed by the TV adaption, and walked into the cinema really looking forward to this new 'IT'eration. I walked out feeling a little bit like I did after watching the Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit series of films. The basic storyline was there, as were many of the events that occurred in the novel, but like the Tolkien adaptions there were too many jarring omissions, additions, other assorted departures from the book for my liking. There were also a tremendous number of continuity errors, mostly concerning characters falling into/being doused with various liquids in one scene, then in the next (during which essentially zero time has passed) being completely dry. The acting was very good - all the characters did a good job in their roles, Bill Skarsgård is a worthy successor to Tim Curry, and was a pleasingly revolting Pennywise, the child actors continued the course set by Stranger things, and were neither annoying, or whiney most of the time, as children in films often are. For a 135 minute film it zoomed by, normally I consider this to be a good thing for a film of this length, as it means I have enjoyed the film, and/or the content has been paced correctly. In this instance, however, it felt rushed, very rushed, as mentioned above, a large amount of content has been omitted from the book - the individual characters stories were heavily truncated. I get the feeling that this film was very much released as a stand alone film, and had it failed at the box office, there would be no part 2 (thankfully this has been averted), and am expecting, a year or so after the second film there to be (like LotR) a very much extended version released, because there is so much that could have been added to the film without making the film seem too long. Anyway, again, to conclude, in its current form, "IT" is a good film, but not a great one. An improvement on the TV adaption primarily in special effects, and little else.