Inferior to first one

Rating: 5/10 (11 September 2019)

Here's the short... The film was definitely fun and entertaining. Although I didn't find it scary enough to be a horror movie nor funny enough to be a comedy, so it falls somewhere inbetween, making it a little bit of a confusing experience. But definitely fun.
Where this movie shines is in the nostalgia. The first one did a great job of transporting us back to our own childhoods, and it was clear that we were seeing the world through the eyes of a child, with adults and bullies all being characatures. This one was almost a nostalgia overload as the kids came back to see their home town, yet I really liked those bits. I was a bit dissapointed that the theme of seeing the world through their eyes didn't continue, this time with kids being characatures.
Perhaps my biggest problem with the film played itself out in the first couple of scenes...
It opens with a gay couple who are attacked by a bunch of thugs simply for being gay... Something I would've bought maybe of we were still back in the 90's but this is taking place in present day. Not only was this a forced little piece of woke, it had absolutely no relevance to the plot, making the filmmakers look desperate to appear intersectional.
The next issue was the following moments where we learn that Mike has been living above the library for years. Now in the original version this would make sense because Mike was the one obsessed with Derry, but for some reason in the first movie they made Ben the one that was into the history of the town, so they just abandoned that and instead decided to try to convince us that Ben was actually a prodigy architect, capable of building an underground structure most adults wouldn't be able to.
These changes are odd because they don't lend themselves to the story in ways that could've been done otherwise.
Steven king makes a cameo as a shop owner which had a lot more opportunities for jokes than they went for, which was a bit of a shame to be honest.
The entire movie is sort of pointing towards the characters getting artifacts from their past to perform a ritual that is supposed to kill the monster. It kind of trudges through these sequences intercutting new scenes with the kids being terrorized by the clown. The scenes from the past are great when they shed light on their present, but boring when they try to include new suspense sequences because we already know they point to nothing.
Another area that confused me was that in the first movie, the things that scared people were fake. But in this movie that seemed to change... To the extent that a zombie was chauffeuring the grown up Henry - so it makes for a confusion of the world we are in.
The other thing that was somewhat frustrating was that Pennywise didn't have any clear goal. In the first one he woke from his slumber to feed on fear and kills kids along the way. Here it's like all he's doing is waiting around for the grown up version of these kids. The only other person he kills is the gay guy from the beginning a d a random kid which also seemed to be to get at Bill.
It's a bit of a she because there was a lot of potential for this to be something special, but instead it took great casting and a great premise and didn't respect itself enough to give us a good ending - which is ironic seeing as one of the elements of the story is that Bill is a writer who is unable to write a good ending.
Bottom line, it's fun but didn't live up to its own potential.