This movie trash

Rating: 3/10 (10 September 2019)

I've never taken the time to review a film on IMDb before but I needed somewhere to vent about the almost 3 hours of my life I'm not going to get back.
Let's start with that, the length. This movie is longer than all The Hobbit films, and just about the length of the first two lord of the rings films, and it had no right or reason to be. There were so many subplots, and characters who's inclusion was clearly for no reason other than "it happened in the book". Dude, it's a film ADAPTATION, cutting the little sideplots that have no real relevance to the main characters or story is part of your job in adapting the book. Perhaps if you were doing a longform tv show adaptation, you could get away with it, but not here. Furthermore, the film spends an unreasonable amount of time showing us flashbacks of stuff we've already seen, or reexplaining plot we already know from the first chapter. To add to this, there are several "scary" scenes that felt entirely secondary to the main story, but seem to have only been left in because there hasn't been a scare in a while or because the movie needed more Pennywise, and that leads me to my next point...
The movie isn't scary. It isn't creepy, it isn't tense, it's rarely even horrifying because of how predictable it ends up. The scares are all comprised of the consistently most formulaic jump scares I've ever scene, or big huge monsters crafted with poor CGI, that removes the rare shred of tension and believability the scenes had left.
Finally, let's get to the Loser's club. Yes, the casting was great, and yes the performances were decent. Good job CD and actors, you're probably the sole reason I'm giving this thing any stars. That being said, I still didn't really care about any of these characters. The movie's success is hinged on the relationships of these characters, as that's what takes up the majority of what's left of the runtime when you take out the subplots. Unfortunately, it fails to be compelling because aside from a brief reintroduction to the characters and where they ended up (the most enjoyable part of the film), the movie doesn't tell us anything about these people we don't already know. Perhaps this was the reasoning behind the added flashbacks (with terrible de-aging on Finn Wolfhard that rivals Superman's Justice League moustache), but yet again, these scenes did very little to advance the characters in any way from what we already knew of them.
I didn't have high expectations for this movie (I thought the first was a fun little movie, but nothing special) however it still managed to disappoint me in almost every regard. Do yourself a favour and go watch The Shining again instead.