Is this perhaps the most anticipated horror film of this year? After seven years of waiting and no less than three different directors and screenwriters, there were certainly a lot of people waiting to see how this turned out. Add to that the entire generation who were traumatised by the 1990 version of Stephen King's IT and Tim Curry's Pennywise (early 90s tweens represent!) and yes, I'd say that this new version of IT has had a lot of people waiting with baited breath to see if it would live up to their expectations.
1989; Derry, Maine. One year after seven-year-old George Denborough "disappears" (read: has an arm ripped off and is dragged into the sewers by Pennywise the Dancing Clown), children in the town are still going missing and the town seems to be doing very little about it aside from establishing a curfew. George's older brother Bill hasn't given up trying to find his brother, however, and has enlisted his friends into his search as well. One by one though, the members of the self-styled "Losers' Club" have their own encounters with Pennywise which they sometimes barely survive, and they realise that there is a dark side to their town - one that has been around for a very long time and which the town's adult population are blind to, whether wilfully or not. It becomes up to the seven of them to find a way to stop Pennywise - or whatever IT is - before its next victim is one of them...
IT is of course a remake of the 1990 TV movie of the same name, and both are - obviously - based on the book by Stephen King. This 2017 version deviates from those previous editions in several ways; some obvious and others less so. For example, if you've read the book you will most likely be unsurprised to learn that that scene (and you know what "that scene" is if you've read the book) is not in the film for obvious reasons - not the least of which was to keep the film from getting an NC-17 rating (or worse...). Other changes include the changing of the time period from the 1950s to the late 1980s and the aging up of Henry Bowers and his gang by a few years.
Another big change from the 1990 film is that this film version of IT focuses solely on the characters' experiences with It as children, rather than trying to split the movie time equally between them as children and them as adults. This change allows for more time to be spent on the Losers' Club's individual experiences with Pennywise (including the leper at the house on Neibolt Street, which personally delighted me), but also lays the groundwork for the inevitable and already greenlit sequel where they all return to Derry as adults (hence why the end credits refer to the film as IT: Chapter One).
But of course, one of - if not the - big question(s) is: how does Bill Skarsgard measure up in the role of Pennywise the Dancing Clown? Answer: he's pretty damn amazing. Skarsgard (and pretty much everyone else) knew that there was going to be no way in which he could match Tim Curry's version of Pennywise, and so he made his own interpretation from scratch. With a more vintage appearance and a softer, more sibilant voice that rarely raises above a whisper, Skarsgard's Pennywise is terrifying in a whole new crouching and dribbling way. To add to his portrayal, he also trained with a contortionist and sometimes spoke in his native Swedish whilst in character, all of which adds to the otherworldliness and "wrongness" of Pennywise. In fact, when Skarsgard was first introduced to the children of the cast as Pennywise, they were all terrified of him by the end of their first scene together.
(The young actors who portray the Losers' Club are also excellent, in that you don't spend your time wondering how old they are really or not really believing their terror as they face off against It. Really, the film has great casting all round, and I'd say that the younger cast members have good careers ahead of them.)
IT is directed by Andy Muschietti, and it's here that perhaps my only complaint with the film lies. Much like with Mama, I found the film to be incredibly and even beautifully atmospheric... but not all that scary. Or at least, not as scary as I'd found the 1990 version to be. Maybe that's just me - a combination of decades of horror watching and a case of nostalgia goggles. Certainly enough people other than me have said that they were scared witless by IT, and it's not as though I didn't enjoy the film any less because of it. It's a rare film where I can't tell if some of the effects are practical and CGI, and so for that alone IT would get at least a halfway positive review from me. As it is, I'd even go so far as to say that IT is one of those rare films that actually deserves the hype and anticipation it received as well. Definitely a must-see.
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