NOT SCARY - I really wish I read the top review here before watching the movie

Rating: 3/10 (16 April 2018)

I, like many other people my age and maybe a little older, grew up with terrifying memories of the original IT miniseries. That miniseries may not hold up too well, but there is one thing it got right - atmosphere. Surreal, alienating, tense atmosphere. Sure, it was kind of cheesy, and doesn't scare 23 year old me nearly as bad as 10 year old me, but I would still say it's scary.
Enter this film. Like the first review said: it's more like the Goonies than, say, the Babadook. It's more like a pre-teen coming of age film than a horror film. There's no tension! There's no atmosphere! That's not to say there aren't moments where the film tries hard to scare its viewers... but it falls extremely flat.
Take the clown, for instance. It's just not that scary in its base form, not nearly as scary as Tim Curry's version for instance. The fact that it's layered with CGI gives it this shiny appearance that really takes away the scare factor. Same goes for much of the other set pieces. They should be scary, but they just aren't! Because there's no atmosphere!
I remember, in the original miniseries, theres a scene where a girl is attacked by the monster through clothes drying on a line. You barely see the clown, and there's no gore. Yet the tension, suspense, and sudden switch in circumstance makes it a particularly haunting scene. Here, the monster is so much more in your face, there's so much more gore, but just it somehow isn't as scary.
Another scene for comparison is the locker shower scene in the original. Here, there's a real feeling of helplessness one feels for Bill as he is alone, naked, confused, and face to face with a demon. There is no comparable moment in this film, despite its much greater production value.
I really wanted to like this movie, and on paper it sounds scary. There is disturbing stuff in here, but it's just not as impactful as it should be. I think it's really the super high production values and big budget cinematography. There's just too much brightness, the environment is too well defined and the areas are too open to allow for tension and suspense.
Also, the music! The music sounds like it was lifted out of a Narnia film. It sounds like some top dollar fantasy action kids movie... not a horror film. That really screwed up the tension for me. This movie probably would've been way scarier if it just completely cut the music at times, or maybe replaced it with some genuine horror soundtrack.
This movie was hyped super hard, and it didn't live up to it. I feel cheated. I know a lot of people will let that go, but not me. It was so totally not worth the 2 and a quarter hour runtime. The Babadook does so much more with a much smaller runtime.
I will say, however, that the humans in the movie are far scarier than the monsters, and if the director was going for that: bravo.