Stephen King's IT (Part One) Spoiler Space

I thought it was absolutely incredible, with one GLARING exception.

The fact that they changed the story so that Bev would be kidnapped and the boys would descend down to fight IT to rescue her was, in my opinion, a betrayal of her character with just cannot be justified. Bev was the fighter, the strong one, the one who really led everybody in actually battling IT -- not just some damsel in distress. I found that completely offputting, and it really took any enjoyment I might have had of the ending away.

Other than that, I think it was the best Stephen King adaptation since Shawshank Redemption.

I saw some people (like the RedLetterMedia guys) making fun of this movie because of its jump scares, even going so far as to compare it to Annabelle Creation. Now, while most of the over the top scare moments didn't quite work for me (Pennywise jumping out of the projector, or rushing Billy in the basement), I still found it an effective movie because it didn't just consist of those parts. It had proper nightmarish imagery, a captivating performance by Skarsgård and characters I cared about. The jump scares were just the dessert, not the whole damn meal.

My favorite scene was the one where Eddie meets Pennywise for the first time. The shot of the pyramid of balloons conceiling Pennywise's head was just too good.

I really liked it/IT. I'm a big movie re-watcher generally speaking, but there have been very few things I've seen in the past couple of years that I feel like I was really excited after seeing in the theaters to rent right away as soon as the DVD came up, much less see again in the theater (much less own -- I've bought almost no Blu-Rays of movies from the past five years that weren't basically out of a kind of fan obligation or completionist collector's streak. Mad Max: Fury Road is maybe the only one I can think of that I felt that real eagerness to rewatch).

But I'm feeling a real weird draw to go see this again -- weird because it's not like it was non-stop aesthetic bliss like Fury Road or the LotR films (which hold the record for movies I saw the most times in theaters), but more a kind of desire to analyze certain scenes and moments a bit more. I didn't feel that feeling when I left the theater, but later at home watching all the spoilerific YouTube reviews and commentaries I avoided before seeing the movie, that urge to go again began to creep in.

That said, I feel oddly irked by the incredibly high praise Skarsgård is getting. Not that he's getting praise -- he deserves praise. But the hyperbolic nature of some of that praise. I saw one discussion by horror geek site that was saying he'd created a new horror icon to displace Freddy Krueger -- a gamechanger. I thought Pennywise worked great for the movie. But I also thought he was about 30% performance and 70% special effect/production design. As a performance, I'd equate it much more to something like Kane Hodder as Jason than Robert Englund as Freddy. I thought he only barely came across as a character -- but that's fine because he doesn't have to be a character, he can be the hollow mask of a incomprehensible cosmic evil. I thought that the most amazing Pennywise moment was the universe-rattling dance he does in the wagon/stage in his lair, with maybe only the corpse-eyed slide back off the basement stairs into the water as a close second. Pennywise was an amazing image in this movie; I'm less sold on him being an amazing character (and I don't even mean that in a three-dimensional internal conflict and complex motivations way -- I just mean it was a creature performance, and a great one, more than a personality performance).

But in that same vein, I also would defend some of the effects that I've seen others criticize. There are definitely a lot of Pennywise (and other It-forms) moments that have the characteristics of rather cheap CGI or bad compositing -- they often feel unconvincingly inserted into reality. But for me, that worked as a way of giving them a nightmarish/hallucinatory quality, where they aren't quite happening in this world, where they have a touch of artificial layering over what's actually there. I like that they feel like almost like they're shot at a different framerate, like they're being projected from an old nickelodeon (lowercase n)  filmstrip into the characters' world. Maybe that's just making apologies for relatively low-budget effects, but I felt it was intentional. I can also understand people getting tired of the herky-jerky monster motion effect, but again, I thought this had a slightly different style to it that made it feel just different enough from Japanese ghost movie stylization.

I'm a bit of the opposite to AB in that I really liked the leper and was underwhelmed by the Modigliani painting lady -- partly just because I've already seen Mama, where the same director used the same concept to much better effect. It definitely felt a bit like the director going, "Well, not that many people really saw Mama, and so I kind of wasted that cool idea in small movie. I'll just use it again here where more people will see it."

Having only a vague memory of the original plot, I wasn't particularly taken aback by the Bev climax (and I did have a recollection of someone being pulled back from the deadlights, so I figured that had been her, though apparently it wasn't). But I'd agree with the comments here that it seems an odd and disappointing choice -- though narratively I can see how they needed to imperil one of the losers. Maybe it is more gender conditioning speaking than the actual character dynamics, but my gut instinct is that it's harder to imagine all the others rallying to rescue anyone else with as unquestioning a sense of urgency as they would with Bev. I feel like you'd have to do more work to make it feel as believable that they're all going to band together after breaking apart in order to rescue Eddie or Ben. Bill, maybe, except that Bill was one of the prime participants in the in-fighting, so you lose the "Let's set aside our argument and rally to the cause" aspect. So I can see how the writers may have gotten there beyond just a running with a damsel in distress convention (not that "let's put aside our male ego bullshit to help a helpless one in need" isn't a traditional component of the damsel-rescue trope, too, so...).

But the real problem is how they set up her abduction. It comes at a moment of her greatest triumph. She's resisted and subdued her father. She's faced her greatest fear. By every other established rule, she should be least vulnerable to Pennywise's power at that moment. So for him to be able to grab her away then is counterintuitive. It would make more sense if she's huddled in the corner of the bathroom terrified, her father pounding on the door, about to break in, and then Pennywise rises out of the drain or something and gets her when she is feeling most threatened and alone.

Curiously, as much as I kind of want to go see this again in the theaters, I don't really feel super enthusiastic about the adult-driven Chapter 2. I kind of just want like a 4-hour director's expanded edition of this version. I liked all the kids' performances (Mike seemed a bit shortchanged by the story -- and he does actually murder somebody, albeit in justifiable self-defense, which seemed a bit glossed-over). I liked the 80s setting. I'm skeptical that the same magic is going to be there for the present-day half of the story.

Logoboros, good points.

One could interpret that moment as a manifestation "Oh shit, I just killed someone" type of fear, but I will concede that that wasn't immediately apparent.

I have a lot of thoughts (as a fanatic of the original 'movie') but I did want to jump in for now and say some of the CGI moments didn't work for me but MOST did. The way he extricated himself from being all folded up in that freezer made my insides crawl. The marionette like movements, so good. Tim Curry is fantastic, but it's hard for me to compare them because it's almost two different characters to me.  

I would admit that one major CGI effect that didn't really work for me (and it's unfortunate, since it comes at a pretty key moment) is Pennywise biting Georgie's arm. That one actually needed to look real, and it didn't (or not for me, anyway). And the way the bite was executed didn't really look like it ought to have severed the arm, either, which made the next moment strange. I'm not sure the end of the scene worked especially well, which is a tough one to get past since it's a major scene and right at the start of the movie. 

The shot of Pennywise biting Georgie looked fake to me too, but the subsequent shot of Pennywise's arm reaching out of the sewer saved the scene for me.

I thought IT was great. The kids were great. Nice sense of dread.

I do wish they hadn't danced around the race issues, honestly. I don't have so much of a problem with Bev's kidnapping, she was treated much worse in the book. Pennywise took her because he couldn't kill her outright, because she wasn't afraid. I mean, the whole point was they had to stick together.

I remembered this conversation while watching it last night, and it seemed to me that Pennywise went after Bev because Bev's the one who got in a nasty shot at him in the house on Niebolt Street. She rammed that thing through his head and drove him off right when he was about to have all of them where he wanted them. He had a grudge against her. Agreed, @matt1, he gets rid of the one who's brave enough to ram something into his head, he can get at the others much more easily.

The imagery was fantastic. I got the things I wanted; well cast kids (Ben and Eddie were especially endearing), the town history with Pennywise lurking among the historic photos, a truly terrifying house on Niebolt Street, and the feel of the town being simultaneously sunlit and normal and dark and sinister. Stan (and Eddie to a lesser extent) were as brittle and close to breaking as they should be, Richie, as ever, is a tiresome ass, and Pennywise was very well done/acted. Several times, I was actually scared, which never seems to happen anymore in the movies.

The only person in the whole thing that I recognized was Mike's grandpa - Steven Williams. I'd never watched anything Skarsgard's been in before.

I didn't mind the change to the '80s at all, in fact, I'd thought of the kids' story as an intrinsically '50s story before and the change didn't matter a bit, so I was wrong about that.