‘IT’ (2017) ***/*****
Finally a Stephen King adaptation that isn’t clownshoes
Seeing as it’s such a huge horror property, it’s kind of crazy that it has taken Stephen King’s IT this long to become a feature film. IT started off its life as a universally beloved novel that was published in 1986, went on to become a misguidedly loved TV mini-series from 1990, and only now in 2017 has its iconic killer clown Pennywise finally, finally been translated to the big screen — or at least half of his story has. You see, King’s original novel introduced us to a cast of characters who we see both back when they were little kids and also as adults in present day, and both the book and the mini-series switched back and forth between the two timelines. This film, from director Andy Muschietti (Mama), only tells the story that took place during the characters’ childhoods, and it lifts that story out of the 60s and drops it right down in the horror-soaked decade of the 80s, when King ruled over pop culture as its King. The plan is that an IT sequel is going to tell the other half of the story somewhere down the line. Splitting the intertwined stories into two standalones was a ballsy move, but it’s pulled off pretty well here, and it seems like people are pretty stoked to see this movie even without any of the payoff that comes from the other half of the tale.
We’ve said that IT is about a killer clown named Pennywise (played memorably by Bill Skarsgård), but what else is going on in this story, specifically? The first thing to know is that Pennywise isn’t actually a clown. He’s a demonic entity that often appears in the form of a twisted clown, but he has Freddy Krueger-like powers where he can morph his appearance and manipulate his surroundings to create horrific scenarios. He lurks in the sewer system of a small town in Maine, and every 27 years he starts snatching the town’s children and murdering them for nefarious reasons that aren’t entirely clear yet, but clarity doesn’t matter much in this movie anyway. The dude is killing children! That’s enough to be engaging. Our heroes are a group of coming of age dweebs who decide to band together and stop the evil entity, as it seems that the town’s adults are more than willing to ignore his existence completely.
The leader of the group is sensitive stutterer Bill (Jaeden Lieberher), whose little brother gets snatched by the clown in the film’s chilling opening scene. The girl of the group is Bev (Sophia Lillis). She’s been hardened by an abusive home life, so she’s the member of the gang who has by far the most gusto. Everyone is in love with her. Rounding out the crew are the foul-mouthed Richie (Finn Wolfhard, Stranger Things), the neurotic hypochondriac Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), the soulful Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), the cowardly Stanley (Wyatt Oleff), and Mike (Chosen Jacobs), who, uh… is home schooled and forced to kill sheep as his daily chores? We don’t learn much about Mike. Anyway, these kids adventuring around on their bikes and battling evil forces feels very much like something you’d see in an 80s movie, and this movie in general feels very authentically like an 80s throwback, complete with kids who have no parental supervision and filthy mouths, so changing the setting to the 80s was a pretty danged brilliant move by the film’s trio of screenwriters (Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, and Gary Dauberman).
What IT does best is create characters who you like and care about and then throw them into legitimately terrifying situations. This movie is full of mood, and it’s very well shot and edited, resulting in an end product that not only looks gorgeous (some scenes in here flat out look like an art film that would be at home at Sundance), but is also able to adeptly set up scares thanks to where the camera is placed and how it moves. The kids here are often legitimately funny (IT’s comic relief was its biggest surprise for me), and they feel like real friends when they’re together on the screen, so you like spending time with them, and it’s that affection for the characters that makes the scenes where they’re put in clown-based peril effectively tense and thrilling. In most horror movies with youthful casts the characters are annoying little shits, so instead of rooting for them to get away you end up cheering on the monster as it mutilates their tiny bodies. That can be fun, but this approach makes for better movies.
The problem with IT is that, at 2 hours and 15 minutes, it’s just too long, and its story is too sprawling (even with half of it excised for a future film), so it’s not able to keep you engaged for its entire run time. The scenes where Pennywise attacks each kid are memorable and scary, but because there are so many kids he has to attack the narrative momentum of the film stops dead for like a whole half hour while you systematically watch him affect each one by exploiting their particular fears, and it starts to feel like you’re on one of those carnival spook rides where a little cart propels you along from ghoulish scenario to ghoulish scenario. It’s repetitive. The problem could easily have been solved by cutting out some of the characters. Stanley and Mike don’t factor into the plot at all and could have been left out with very little being changed. Eddie gets so little focus that he exists pretty solely as a cartoon stereotype. Cut these guys out and maybe the others could have been fleshed out even more, and likely a good 20 minutes or so could have been shaved off of the movie’s run time. This would have the fortunate result of leaving us the film’s strongest actors anyway, as the leads here tended to be very strong, but the kids playing the more ancillary characters were much more touch and go.
Despite the fact that it gets a little long in the tooth, IT is still a rich experience that’s well worth checking out. They really got Pennywise right here (despite a slightly too liberal use of CG effects), and the crowd I saw it with really bit on all of his big scary moments. And aside from the fun horror movie stuff going on in here, this is also a thematically dense story that preserves the heart of what made King’s original novel so memorable and beloved. Sure, there’s a killer clown here, but the real scary monsters of IT are adults and adulthood, and the inevitable pain that comes during the process of becoming one. The characters here are generally terrified of the awful adults in their lives, but they’re also really freaked out because they’re at that age where they’re starting to become adults themselves, and they’re experiencing the first moments of compromise and corruption that adulthood entails. Eventually that makes IT become a tooth and nail fight to preserve the innocence of childhood, which is a pretty damned wholesome thing for a movie with a demonic clown at its center to be about. Audiences will likely yawn and check their watch a few times while watching IT, but also they’ll come away from it having had some fun and feeling a little bit uplifted. I can’t think of a better reason to go to the movies than that.
