It's not easy to make a movie from King's masterpiece

Rating: 4/10 (15 June 2019)

The effort is there, the production is good, but the direction is so poor and non-scary that the whole movie crumbles. Every single "scary" scene is lazy and dull, and brings that awful, millennial, "you should be scared" flavour. Pennywise himself has something wrong in his look, I'd say he's cutesy and stupid, not scary. He runs squirming, and that's supposed to be creepy but it's absolutely not, so that it comes out just as an unnecessary and clumsy vfx. The worst thing about Pennywise is that being these scenes so lazily directed, when he unmistakeably fails to catch the kids he just seems totally unharming.
The movie starts the wrong way, with Georgie who is unreasonably amused by a clown with a creepy face. Right there, you know that the director will be forcing the scare all the time.
"It" fails to deliver that truly nightmarish atmosphere that was so strong in the book, the eerie deaths and missing kids.
Even the real-word dramas and some characters are quite poorly depicted, particularly Bev's abusive father and Eddie.
Overall, It ends up more like a kids movie than a horror movie. I'm surprised by the metacritic score.
Furthermore, offsetting the year from the fifties to the eighties was a huge mistake. The fifties were much harder on the kids than the eighties, family dramas were probably too, and characters like Bowers would have been much more menacing.
Lastly, I really don't understand why they cut the whole 27-years-later setting. I guess it's reserved for the second movie, but they should have told the two stories at the same time, just like in the book. A temporary ending (like those in Star Wars etc) would have made both chapters more interesting.
3.5 stars for me.