It Chapter Two

super good. loved the actors they chose for the adults. bitter sweet ending but i loved it :)

i absolutely love IT chapter one and two. all the characters are portrayed very well. i couldn’t have thought of better actors for the adult versions of the kids of IT chapter one. the whole idea of IT was genius and still cant get over it! stephen king is appreciated by me! fs

Too many things weigh the movie down and keep it from resonating like the first chapter. And too much time is squandered in the wrong places.

6.2 - (very long review, but the second half is just me complaining about misses in adaptation to the story, so top half is what matters for the movie.)

Sadly, as much as Muschietti’s It excelled in adaptation, this falters even more.

The casting was awesome, especially visually - they absolutely nailed each kid’s personality & looks. And Bill Skarsgård again is fantastic as Pennywise - just exudes evil.

I do think that they over relied on Skarsgård/Pennywise here. In the first movie, they understood the idea of the fear that builds when the monster isn’t on screen. In this one it felt like they wanted him on screen absolutely whenever possible & I think that added the most to the excessive length here. Beyond the length, the decisions I highlight below are what kill the pacing problems & left me with less fear & more frustration at the end (even before reading).

I do think overall, it’s a decent horror movie, & does deserve some credit, but I think it could have, and should have, been great, especially after how well the first movie pulled off what it did, adapting an absolute behemoth of a book.

6.2/10

Issues I had with the movie’s approach to the story & adaptation (book spoilers):

Shoehorned in moments that were left out of the first (the Clubhouse, Richie’s childhood vision of Paul Bunyan); The Ritual & how it was performed, plus made up story threads that added little of value (Richie being gay, the “tokens”, you can’t “trap” It); & worst of all, retconned or changed character moments that changed the baseline of some character’s whole personality &/or resolutions (diving into these more below).

First, the lack of Audra and Tom’s resolutions is important because it doesn’t close Bill and Bev’s loops on their relationship development that they carry into adulthood and makes their kiss completely unnecessary.

Next, skateboard kid dying just re-traumatizes Bill instead of inspiring him to end the fight, & then seeing him again signaling the finality & success of their battle for Derry, like in the book.

Cutting out Maturin all together, especially after all the hints in the first movie takes a lot of the intensity of the final battle & really adds to the “kids just bullied an eldritch horror to death” problem. I understand it’s “weird” without context, & it’s hard to show a Battle of Wills on screen, but at least including it in the explanation instead of the exclusively made up tribe (which I actually like but could have been linked easily to Maturin) could have been so valuable. And then there was still no reason to not have the battle end the way it did in the book with a bigger emphasis on physical harm to the Spider being (which shouldn’t have kept the Pennywise torso, that was also dumb visually).

And maybe worst of all, Stan’s letters to the crew combined with the lack of forgetting again. Stan writing letters saying he hoped his decision brought them together paints his suicide as a selfless decision and not the pure terror it was. It says in a way that suicide is a noble choice. That’s wrong & shouldn’t be promoted as such. It also lowers the stakes in the movie. In the story, not having the full circle of The Losers Club is a huge detriment, it makes it that much harder on them, & that doesn’t translate here. In the same vein, I also think them not forgetting again is the wrong choice because it takes a lot of the selflessness out of their actions. They expect to forget again, & hope they don’t but they choose to fight anyway. Letting them remember takes a level of finality away.

On the same note, I’m sure that budgets were high and obviously length was an issue but removing the flood and storm that followed the end of the battle was a huge miss. That ending not only was significant because it washed away a lot of the memory & a lot of the evil in the town but it also was a fantastic symbol for the true end of the group’s childhood & a reason for them to fully move on to their earned adult lives. Plus it would have looked cool on screen.

I’m planning on watching the 1990 version soon (have seen half but not the ending) so I’m excited to get a full comparison but my hopes are low for accuracy again, so I hope we can eventual adaptation that can stick the landing because the book’s ending is sad in a lot of ways, but also beautiful in how it handles each character’s future.

7.3

While it is entertaining, it is also pretty cheesy a lot of the time. At nearly 3 hours, this movie happens to be a decent sequel to the first film, which was good too. The cast was all perfectly selected and the scenes were scary, but I definitely wasn’t terrified. 8/10!!!!!!!!!