This movie demonstrates why hype is a bad thing

Rating: 5/10 (21 January 2018)

This movie war hyped up big time: it's trailer was excellent, it was promoted all over the internet and TV as a huge, game changing horror. Having read the book it was based on, hype seemed reasonable. But i decided to ignore the hype and postpone reading the book so i could see this movie without bias.
It wasn't that good.
On bright side, all actors do good job (especially kids that play Bill and Beverly). Movie looks nice and on technical aspect, it is better than 1990's miniseries. But when it comes to bad stuff... Oh boy.
First big problem that is easy to notice is time period change. It was completely pointless and seemed more as a cash-in on Stranger Things and other 80's nostalgia crap. Due to this change, story loses a lot of it's important elements, like racism. It was definitely much stronger in 50's than in 80's.
Second: characterisation. Bill has lost his brother and wants to find him. OK, that makes sense. What about everyone else? What do we get to know about them? When it comes to Eddie and Richie, they are more comedy duo than characters. At first they were funny, but they got annoying after some time. Beverly is the closest one to having some form of character arc, but it remained mostly underdeveloped. Her relationship with Ben started out as very sweet, but then, all of sudden, she loves Bill. Where the hell did that come from? Characters of Mike and Stan are pointless, as they do absolutely nothing of importance throughout whole movie. No, wait, Mike pushed the bully down the well. Yay! But so could anyone else.
Third: Pennywise. In older adaptation, Pennywise was your typical monster with unknown origins and without any backstory or explanation of what it is. But he at least had personality, thanks to Tim Curry. From being joyful, he turns into monster within seconds. And that's great. In this movie, on other hand... It was just a generic, dumb monster without any character or personality. I honestly couldn't understand how he managed to lure children to come to him. Even though he was intimidating in the opening scene, he got more and more annoying with each next appearance, up to the point where you don't even care. And the fact that he was mostly CGI didn't help him.
Fourth: CGI. How can 2017's movie with multi-million budget end up with such bad and unrealistic effects? None of the CGI monsters looked real, and therefore were not scary nor intimidating. The most annoying part was that they would always show up followed by annoying loud sound effect, which only ruins suspense even more.
Fifth: plotholes. Yes, there were those too. Like: why the hell does Henry Bowers wants to kill Ben at the beginning of the movie? Did any of the bullies notice that one of their friends is missing? If one kiss brought back Beverly from lifeless state, could they also save other kids? What happened to Georgie? Was he also among the floating kids? Why are those kids floating in the air, anyway? Isn't it more logical that they float on surface of the water? Did director just wanted a cool visual? Why does Beverly kiss with Bill even though Ben kissed her just 5 minutes ago?
If you can overlook these issues, you will find this movie good. Myself, i could tolerate some of them, while others would just piss me off. And now after reading the book, i have to say that IT fails as an adaptation too. Even though it has some fun parts, IT is very forgettable movie, and definitely not a game changer in horror genre.