The best King adaptation of the year (which isn't saying much)

Rating: 6/10 (10 September 2017)

There are different approaches and styles of storytelling but I have always thought that bestselling novelist Stephen King has a good grip over the most effective one of them. He has the image of horror master but his stories offer actually much more than quick thrills. You possibly couldn't churn out up to 1100 page opuses based on just thrills, could you? King's focus is always on careful character and world building because why would one want to just follow a bunch of events if one didn't care about the people in the story and what's happening to them. And he's usually scarily efficient at creating characters that we want to form emotional connections to. I have read most of King's 57 novels by now, and I am often hooked already on the first page, or maybe the second. The careful character and world building doesn't just happen at once, it takes time and room. This is one of the main reasons why most of King's adaptations are not great ones. There is no way to compress hundreds of pages into a screen story lasting about two hours. Take Â„IT", for example. In an original novel, there's more than 1100 pages. As a movie, it runs 135 minutes, including end credits. There was never gonna be a chance to see more than main events on screen, not to mention Hollywood's nasty way of often taking a famed literary work of fiction and throwing out almost everything but the main plot points and character names. I read Â„IT" more than ten years ago, so I don't remember it all that well, but the movie version feels... right. They have taken the best of both worlds: sweet nostalgia-tinged coming of age story as a backbone and the horrors served in short intervals aside. Both aspects work well, neither feels fresh but they are effective. Coming of age story resembles 1986's Â„Stand by Me", one of the most acclaimed King adaptation of all time. Horrors are created the cheap way, that is to say, mostly by editing and sudden creepy music or sound effects. Nothing essentially wrong with that, most horror movies do the same and they still have plenty of fans. I myself have quite tired of this and would have preferred slow and creepy building of suspense â€“ this would have fit more closely with King's original work too â€“ but whatever. The problem me is that there's just too many Â„horror" moments, after one hour it's starting to feel like a carnival show. One has to be a true horror fan to not feel exhaustion before the end, or possibly reaching the middle of the story. Two-plus hours is a long way to watch somebody attacked over and over again by the same two or three evil creatures. I mean, I like Pennywise and his crew as much as anybody but there's only so much times it feels cool to see some monster suddenly jump out from somewhere and say "boo". I was quite curious about how the adaptation would Â„solve" this famous sex scene from the original novel. There's probably no tasteful way to offer it in mainstream movie, so they have opted to not use it all. Wise choice. King should have left it out in the book, too. So. For a horror movie, Â„IT" is good enough if overly ready to use the same couple of tricks over and over again. For a movie inspired by King's work, it's also good enough, giving you the simple but clear taste of what the bestselling master is possibly about. For a King adaptation, it's mediocre as most of them, setting the bar too low to start with. So, you just have to go catch it and see whether you'll float too. There's a possibility of part two although it's hard to tell how concrete this is. Probably depends on the box office success. The movie ends the same way as the novel, which means there The young actors in part 1 are good, by the way.