Tries to do everything at once

Rating: 6/10 (21 September 2017)

I loved Stephen King's It, as I am such a cultured critic, and I'd always wanted to watch it in movie form blah blah, on to the real review:
This movie was not really that scary. I love horror movies and sat in the theater surrounded by teenagers too young to even be here. I refuse to believe that they could in any way be scarred by this experience, as each scare was undercut by humor, and the scares themselves were not really that intense. In fact, I'd recommend this movie to people aged 12-15, as the toilet humor and sexual jokes seemed to be right up their alley, and I'm saddened to hear that the language apparently was enough to warrant this movie an R-rating. One of the problems is that this movie - beautifully shot and heart-warming as it is - fails to both build up the tension and provide something genuinely scary as a pay-off. Sometimes, it did manage to do one or the other, but never at the same time. It doesn't help that the monster appears way too often, and with all the kids fighting, running, throwing rocks and what-not, it often felt like I was watching a particularly gritty action movie, not an actual horror.
As for the music, it sucked. Not because it was exclusively bad, but because it was too loud to have any subtlety, and because some of it didn't match the tone of the scene(the loudness making it even more grating).
Now, the kids. As others have stated, their acting was great, in fact I found them better than most of the adults. They had actual screen presence, and the casting and dialogue between them is where this movie shines - their personalities and actions really did ring true most of the time, at least for me.
One thing I continuously took issue with, though, is the treatment of the character, Beverly Marsh. I've read the gross-out controversial scene between her and the boys in the book, and was thankful that they left this out of the movie - but this is still no excuse.
I know we are supposed to watch her through the eyes of the teenage boys, but they overdid it. The collective sum of the many full body shots, the red lipstick and the way the camera follows her around is not only kinda gross, it also hinders and changes her character development. They could have chosen to make her just as much a part of the group as she was in the book, but instead they made her almost exclusively an object of desire, and - in the end - a damsel in distress. Beverly is still presented as a complex and brave girl - but unlike the book, she is first and foremost a "woman". Like how they changed her father from a controlling physically abusive man, to a hair-sniffing pedophile. What's the issue with this, you say? Oh, nothing, save for the fact that the boys also continuously point out her hair, writes poems about it, and so on. It's supposed to be cute, but it can't be, because of the newly introduced context of sexual abuse. When Beverly is unconscious and is awaken by a passionate kids from one of the boys, how can you feel anything other than uncomfortable, when you've just seen her crying over the sink, cutting off her hair in deep shame and fear of being desired? So many situations here reminded me of the book Lolita, but in a bad and exploitative way.
I also did find it strange that they didn't just set the movie in the 50s, as I think the unsupervised children and the dark violence the entire city inhabits, had more to do with an era gone by. I know, I know, things like this still happens now, as it does in the 80s, but it would've just been more believable this way, what with the evil cop and people getting burned to death just because they're black. Besides, It is a story of innocence lost - and what era has been viewed more through rose-colored lenses, as the 50s? I really wish they would've avoided the 80s trends here, and just focused on the truth of the story.
In fact, this is the reason why It never completely works, and you can't fully blame them. They had the running time of a movie, and they tried to do it all - but it's impossible to sum up a 1000-page book with 8 fully-developed main characters, even when you split it in half. And it is crucial that you get inside the character's heads in this particular horror story, because their personal deepest fears is all you ever get to see. And how can you be scared by this, if you don't understand them? They would've been better off sacrificing even more of the source material, in order to have a more consistent tone, and more well-developed characters. It was doomed to be a mess from the beginning.