Full disclosure: the 1990 mini-series adaptation of Stephen King’s novel IT was one of the defining movies of my teenage years. When nothing better was happening on any given weekend, my friends and I used to while away a few hours watching it and we must have seen it a dozen times or more. It also became a pop-culture touchstone among my greater social circle, with quotes like “Beep-beep, Richie!” and “Kiss me, fatboy!” becoming part of our lexicon.
Beyond any personal bias, the mini-series was a fine interpretation of the source material (aside from the infamous climax, which features a stop-motion monster so terrible it wouldn’t have looked out of place in a 1950s B-movie). The cast, young and old, put in memorable performances and of course the centrepiece was Tim Curry as Pennywise – an extraordinary confluence of charisma, humour and menace. So it was with some reservation that I sat down to watch IT: Chapter One last night.
I don’t think I’ve ever had such a conflicted reaction to a film.
There are so many elements to analyse that it’s difficult to know where to begin. Perhaps with the elephant in the room: the first half of the story has been moved from the late 1950s to the late 1980s. This is so the second chapter, which comes out next year, will occur in the present day. Now that’s an understandable decision, but not one that sits well with the subject matter, in my opinion. IT is, in many ways, a period piece, and its events are only plausible because of when it is set. In the 1950s, thirteen-year-old kids were left to their own devices and it was quite conceivable that a group of children in Derry could do battle with an evil clown without their parents ever knowing. But transplanting that conceit to the 1980s just doesn’t ring true. It also means Pennywise’s manifestation as the things they fear loses any connection to 1950s horror movies. This shouldn’t matter, but for some reason it does – perhaps because the contrast between a kid’s unsophisticated terrors (the Mummy, the Wolfman etc.) and the real article (children being abducted and torn apart) disappears.
Then there are the screenwriters’ attempts to create verisimilitude, which are about as subtle as a train crash. The cinema board that blares BATMAN and LETHAL WEAPON 2, the reference to Beverly Marsh as “Molly Ringwald”, the recurring mentions New Kids On The Block (which in fairness are sometimes funny), Richie Tozier making fun of Henry Bowers’ mullet – only a flashing subtitle that read THIS FILM IS SET IN THE 1980s! could have been less subtle.
While watching the trailer for the remake, it was the depiction of Pennywise that worried me most, however, and on one level, I was right to feel that way. Unlike Tim Curry’s nuanced, multi-faceted character, this Pennywise is a one-dimensional boogeyman. From the opening scene the actor and director show their collective hand and have nowhere to go. When Georgie Denborough lost his paper sailboat into a stormwater drain and came face to face with Pennywise, I found myself wondering why Georgie didn’t just get up and run. Throughout the remaining two hours of the film, it was just, “Oh, it’s the scary clown again.”
Having made that criticism, let me then turn around and say the scary scenes are immensely effective, some of the best I’ve seen in many years. Argentinian director Andres Muschetti understands the craft of the horror movie better than just about any of his Hollywood contemporaries. His use of camera angles, framing, focus and other simple cinematographic effects creates both suspense and outright terror – and he never resorts to the ‘shoot it all in the dark’ cop-out so favoured by sub-par horror directors. Nearly every frightening scene in IT is ‘daylight horror’, and when shadows or darkness are used, they don’t cheat the viewer. There are no cheap frights here.
And, more broadly speaking, IT is a visual triumph. The locations, the sets, the costumes and make-up effects, the cinematography, are all pretty close to faultless. I don’t think the child actors are quite as memorable in their physical appearance as those in the 1990 telemovie, but their performances are more than satisfactory, especially Sophia Lillis as Beverly.
If I had to pick the one thing that disappointed me the most – even more than the one-trick-pony Pennywise – it’s the film’s inconsistent tone. It seems to have bi-polar disorder, moving from wisecracking to horror to tenderness to wisecracking to horror again with no discernible pattern or plan. It also skims over the characters’ social circumstances, which is where it is most notably inferior to the mini-series. The adults barely get a look-in, save for the occasional vignette that is a poor substitute for proper scene-setting and character building. The result is that the parents end up like Pennywise – they’re cardboard villains who do little other than serve the plot.
All of the above might suggest I disliked IT: Chapter One, yet that’s not the case. The two-and-a-bit-hour running time passed in a flash and I don’t think even the harshest critic could claim it is boring. I came into it with genuine fears that it would be a terrible treatment of what is probably King’s best-known book, and came away with most of those fears allayed. Perhaps the best way to sum it up is that it’s the converse of the mini-series. The 1990 adaptation had an almost perfect screenplay but couldn’t back it up with effective visuals; the movie is almost beyond reproach in its cinematography and effects, but has shortcomings in its script.
Anyone who has read the novel or seen the mini-series knows the ‘second chapter’ relies much less on period elements for its effectiveness, so it should suffer less from its switch to the late 2010s. Which is to say, I’ll be in the cinema on the opening night of IT: Chapter Two next year.