Crowd-pleasing but soulless reboot

Rating: 5/10 (20 October 2018)

I realize that the 1990 TV miniseries version is universally dumped on and don't have a problem with the property being remade for a new generation. But whether or not you care about such things, the old It had a tangible soul and this one doesn't.
You can criticize the old It for not being scary enough, for not having good enough special effects, or a good enough cast, or whatever other reason you can come up with: the two things it lacked were fashionable edginess (no swearing or sex or violence of a level pleasing to today's audiences would have been allowed on broadcast television back then) and teenagers. The characters in old It were shown as children and middle-aged adults, which was fine for a time when television made book on appealing to as many demographics as possible, whereas new It is aimed at the prime demographic for theatrical horror films, which is kids who aren't technically old enough to see R or even PG-13 movies but are watching them anyway. That's why the main protagonists were changed from pubescent children to near-adults.
Old It is about childhood trauma and abuse and its lasting effects, and how friendship and love can help us cope with it. This It is about, well, teenagers in a horror movie. There's no psychological realism in it whatsoever. A kid who's sadistic to other kids is revealed to have a sadistic father: sadistic kid kills sadistic father: that's a horror movie's idea of a satisfying resolution. A girl whose father is being creepily sexual with her is creepily sexual with the man at the drug store so her friends can rob the place: that's a teen movie's concept of morality. Meanwhile the serial-killing CGI bundle only succeeds in putting our heroine into a state of suspended animation, for no other reason than she has to be kept alive for the sequel and nobody cares about those other dead kids. Violating the rules of your own fictional universe for purposes of moving your plot in the direction you want it to go in is never a good precedent, especially when you've still got half the story left to tell.
I've never liked the design of this Pennywise. He doesn't look like any clown that any small town American child would have encountered, and unless you find Germanic people innately creepy I don't understand why Bill Skarsgaard was even cast in the role. I understand why they cast Tim Curry--Frankenfurter, like Pennywise, is both a clown and a stony-hearted alien, and as in "Rocky Horror" Tim delivered. And the character design of the old Pennywise is genius. He looks like a standard issue American clown, but if you look at him just the right way, you can see the skull in his face.
I think the proof of the pudding is you can dub Ugandan Knuckles or Gangnam Style into sequences featuring new Pennywise and his menace evaporates. But nothing will strip old Pennywise of his ability to haunt us.