An Improvement On the First One

Rating: 8/10 (15 March 2020)

Going into It Chapter Two, I was fully expecting this movie to be awful.
The adult portion of the story has notoriously been poorly portrayed. The adult half is easily the less compelling part of the book and the part of the miniseries where the story quickly begins to lose favor with the audiences.
Once again, this film does a good job of making an abridged version of a novel that wasn't all that great to begin with.
The positives are much the same as the original one. I loved the efforts to go back to story elements of the first one to add things in that were left out of the original. It creates a nice little nod to the original and offers enough additional content to maintain interest and enrich the story. The way in which the side of the story in this film is portrayed was done successfully and interestingly, and the surplus runtime was sufficient enough to tell the story without making it feel cramped, rushed or diluted.
Pennywise falls victim once again to the awful special effects that have a major diminishing effect on the final product. Bill is a fantastic actor who doesn't need digital enhancements. This film, however, is a little less of a disservice to him, offering him a bit more of an opportunity to act without hiding behind a computer generated artificial image.
This is a movie not without its flaws, but it's by far more enjoyable than the first chapter with enough of substance to make it worthwhile to watch again. Still, the two movies together are more than sufficient. A supercut would be interesting but, beyond that, I'm hoping that this story stays where it is. Just like I said in the review for the first chapter, this is a story that works best when it's limited to the imaginations of the readers instead of diluted for film. Although I will always maintain IT to be among the weakest of King's novels, it would be foolish to not acknowledge the beloved status it holds among Constant Readers. The films will only have a diminishing effect on the books.
This was a solid entry in the King universe, but let's let it end with that.