Review: IT

IT finally happened.  And by IT, I mean I went and saw IT.

Bad title-related puns aside, this is one that I’ve been pretty excited about for a while now.  While I’ve never read the source novel nor seen the original miniseries, I have read and enjoyed a number of Stephen King‘s other works, and I like a good scary movie now and again.  Add a record-breaking trailer and a solid amount of positive reviews and buzz on top of that, and you have my attention.  Let’s get right into it.  Spoiler alert, though – I was a big, big fan, so if you’re looking for a review that somehow differentiates itself from the chorus of praises being piled upon IT, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

This isn’t IT-related, I just needed to fill space, so here’s a picture of my house.

Make no mistake: while IT has its fair share of jump scares, where I found it truly at its most horrifying was during the quieter, more unsettling moments.  Andy Muschietti makes excellent use of lights and camera to deliver countless action shots that might be more apt to make an audience cringe and shrink with fear rather than scream, feasting on a number of the setpieces that King so graciously provides – and that Cary Fukanaga (of True Detective fame), Chase Palmer, and horror vet Gary Dauberman so faithfully bring to the silver screen.  Some scenes that stand out: Richie’s heavily foreshadowed confrontation with a room full of clowns on Neibolt Street, Beverly’s Dexter-esque bathroom bloodbath, the slideshow scene (pictured below) and of course Eddie’s encounter with the Leper, which in fact was cut from early drafts of the screenplay.

No spoilers, but this scene had me extremely on edge by the end of it.

Another aspect that drives the horror home effectively is the use of children as the protagonists.  We’ve all watched countless scary movies in which a number of the cast members are killed due to an overage of curiosity, a lack of good survival sense, or both, and I personally found that with children navigating the twists and turns of Pennywise’s various torments, I was more forgiving of a character’s wanting to investigate that creepy voice or wander into a dark room to see if they actually heard that door slam.  Take it this way: kids are more naturally curious, and less is typically expected of them in terms of understanding the world’s darkness, and for that reason it feels pretty silly yelling at a screen when they’re the ones on it.

If ever I break my arm, I can only hope my cast is this flattering.

Compounding this crucial perspective is the fact that most adults in Derry either seem oblivious, uninterested, or at times straight up evil.  Disregarding for a moment the outwardly abusive situation Beverly finds herself in, we also at various times in the film see parents yelling at their children (berating them for holding out hope over a missing sibling, blaming them for a broken arm that was actually caused by an ancient evil, etc.), stuffing an absurd amount of medications down their throats, and at one point even shooting at them.  Furthermore, this makes no mention of the absolute indifference of most adults towards the fact that so many more innocent people – namely children – go missing in Derry, never to be found, than anywhere else.  Here’s a tip – if you’re a librarian and you bump into a clearly terrified kid in the poorly-lit basement of a library in a town with a known child-napping problem, you might want to ask him a few questions before brushing him off.

Sophia Lillis is excellent as Beverly Marsh.

The film’s heroes, and the primary ensemble cast around which most of the action is centered, has affectionately dubbed themselves The Losers Club, and they all – in their own way – possess traits emblematic of high school’s less socially fortunate, which really took me on a pleasant trip down memory lane.  There’s the protagonist, Bill Denbrough (Jaeden Lieberher), leading the rest on an often ill-planned mission to find his lost little brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott).  There’s Ben Hanscom (Jeremy Ray Taylor), a portly new kid in Derry who chooses to spend his lonely summer becoming a small-town historian.  There’s Mike Hanlon (Chosen Jacobs), a gun-shy homeschooled kid with a devastating past who takes up a spot in the Losers’ group after a run-in with the fiendish Henry Bowers (Nicholas Hamilton).  There’s Eddie Kaspbrak (Jack Dylan Grazer), a hypochondriacal, Macaulay-Caulkin-in-The-Pagemaster-like boy constantly in a young Fred Savage lookalike contest.  There’s Stan Uris (Wyatt Olef), the son of a rabbi with a particularly relatable fear of misshapen fine art subjects.  And finally, there’s Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis), the oft-sought-after lone female in the group, forced to deal throughout with an abusive father and an overabundance of false rumors swirling around her.

IT is like The Sandlot, except instead of playing baseball they all get together to fight shapeshifting demons.

Rounding out the Sandlot-esque teen crew is perhaps the most enjoyable character of the bunch, at least comedically speaking – Richie Tozier.  Richie’s dialogue is rife with one-liners throughout, and Finn Wolfhard plays the role excellently.  All told, the entire child cast did quite well, with Wolfhard and Lillis setting themselves apart with roles that are respectively funny and heavy.

Why, yes, I did let IT’s costume department use the glasses I wore in the third grade.

Driving all of the chaos, though, is Pennywise, the embodiment of an evil so pure and so powerful that even the twisted creator himself, Stephen King, refuses to write about him again.  Having never seen the Tim Curry version of the character, I have little basis for comparison here, but as far as I can tell, Bill Skarsgard was fantastic from his beginning interaction with Georgie in the sewer to the bitter end.  Perhaps the most chilling piece of Skarsgard’s character was not the sinister voice, nor the menacing smile, but the way it moved, be it through the famous dance, general contortion, or the truly bone-chilling berserker-like head-shaking charge demonstrated at various points throughout the story.  Skarsgard’s dedication to the role shows through in his performance, and it will be a thrill to see him bring even more to the role in the next go-round.  The real question: can he make all of the adult actors cry during his first day on set like he did with the kids?

Truly the stuff of nightmares, and I’m not even afraid of clowns.

Being the first chapter, plenty of other questions remain unanswered at this point, but not all of them relate directly to the plot, nor the fate of IT.  What’s the significance of the key that Beverly Marsh wears?  Who will headline the cast for IT Chapter Two (set 27 years in the future)?  Will anyone else besides The Losers Club notice everyone going missing in 2016 after the advent of social media?  Here’s hoping we find out when IT Chapter Two drops in 2019, but in the meantime, check out the first installment if you haven’t already.