Good kids in a safe and a bit outdated adaptation

Rating: 6/10 (4 September 2017)

The new adaptation of IT has a lavish Spielbergian approach to the proceedings which partly works and partly really doesn't. All child actors are well cast, with their strengths and weaknesses perfectly at display. Their interaction and friendship is handled with ease and good humour and is by far the most enjoyable part of the story.
Less tasteful is how they interact with adults who are distant and authoritative or just as much monsters as the one that is after the kids. The recent Stranger Things, one cast member of which reappears, had this covered much better, with the obvious note that Stranger Things itself is an evolution of King's and Spielberg's earlier works. The school bullies are also ridiculously evil and inhuman which is seldom seen in today's media.
As King's popular novel is much copied, the terrifying events, however carefully produced, come across somewhat outdated. The number of jump scares feels like yet another throwback to old-school horror. Music swells to underline everything that happens on the screen, with no emotion without a score to tell the audience exactly what they should be experiencing right now. That gets intrusive quickly.
What the marketing entirely skips, this is actually the part 1. It covers the first half of the novel only, with the rest coming in the part 2.