Not as good as it should have been, but not THAT bad

Rating: 7/10 (4 January 2018)

Finally got to see this last night, and while the film is not a perfect adaptation of IT, far from it, it is certainly not a 1/10 train wreck like some of the reviewers here claim. Having read some reviews my expectations were extremely low, but the film had an impact on me in a way I did not expect. While it was good and scary as it should be, it got me thinking a lot about the book and how it affected me.
I read IT in the spring of 1989 when I was fifteen years old, which means I don't remember much more of what happened in it than what they brought into the movie. However, I do remember how it made me feel. It made me feel longing, dread, love, loss and sorrow. When I finished the book I cried the rest of the night, not because of what happened to the characters in it, but because I wanted to be with them. They were my friends and I would never be able to be with them again, and that hurt more than anything I had ever experienced before. IT was the first and still is one of very few books that has ever had that effect on me. Watching the film last night did not in itself have that effect on me, but it did bring back some memories of those feelings.
I believe for an on screen adaptation of IT to really capture the essence of the novel A LOT more time needs to be invested into character development. Therefore a well produced and written TV series over two seasons would have been much more fitting, IT is just not a story that allows itself to be crammed into a couple of two-hour films.
Because of that the film leaves much to be desired as an adaptation of IT, but as a scary film on its own I liked it. Of course it helps that I don't remember enough detail from the novel to be offended at all the omissions. It has been 29 years since I read IT, and watching the film made me realize just how little I actually remember of it. I just bought myself a paperback edition, tonight I'm about to start out on a journey meet my friends again, and I couldn't be happier.
Not a bad result for the film after all.