I read Stephen King’s IT in high
school and remember it provoking a couple of sleepless nights. It was a very
good book, but it had certain flaws. For one thing, it was incredibly long,
over 1000 pages. It seemed to me at the time, then and now, that the book had
no editor. Noone at the publisher ever thought to read the manuscript and
suggest that any portions of the book be cut for time. By this point, Stephen
King had more than a decade of bestsellers behind him. Maybe as a rule the
printers felt his words, all of them, were sacrosanct. Secondly, I never really
understood IT. I wasn’t sure whether it was a form of imagination whose power
would wane if someone didn’t believe in it, or whether it was a real thing that
could kill you whether you believed it was real or not. And then there was the
general weirdness of IT, which I will explore more later.
The movie “IT: Chapter 2” is a
good movie whose sum is less than its parts. It has problems, and to its credit,
they are the same problems of the book. The movie is too long with too many
scenes of two many characters that the Director Andy Muschietti did not have
the courage to cut. And it isn’t really clear what IT is or how it really
functions. And its weird. So the movie has the same problems of the book, which
in turn make it a mediocre movie. However, if what you wanted to see was a
faithful adaptation of IT, well, you got it, weirdness and all.
The book has been wisely separated
into two chapters. The first chapter came out a few years ago and told the story
of the main characters as kids. They had an initial victory against IT,
personified by a nasty clown named Pennywise (Bill Skarsgaard), but did not
ultimately vanquish IT. Then six of the original seven kids left town and
generally forgot about their haunted town of Derry, Maine. As grown-ups they
receive a message from the one person who stayed Mike Hanlon (played by Isaiah
Mustafa). IT is back. The others don’t quite remember yet, but they all show up
in Derry. Their numbers include Beverly Marsh (Jessica Chastain), Bill
Denbrough (James McAvoy), Richie Tozer (Bill Hader), Ben Hanscrom (Jay Ryan),
Eddie Kasparak (James Ransome). They called themselves the losers club back
then and each had their pet “loser” qualification. Bill had a stutter, Ben was
fat, Mike was black, etc. Of course, there were also seven of them and they
were all friends, so how much of a loser could each possibly be. Like the heroes
in Stranger Things (shout out to the cross-over Finn
Wolfhard), who played ceaseless hours of Dungeons and Dragons together, I felt like
this Losers Club had a lot of fun and support, besides, of course the evil town and its
murderous clown.
It is hard to describe what IT is
because it seems to have extraordinary capabilities (it can show up anywhere
and look like anything) but weirdly unable to kill people when it really wants
to. To put it another way, a lot of non-main characters die horrible deaths by
IT. The main characters get put in the exact same positions but generally
escape through no particular kind of sustained logic. Whether IT is harmful or
harmless seems to gyrate wildly in the movie (as it did in the book).
IT the movie like IT the book is of
a highly episodic nature. The talented cast are together in a few scenes, but
generally move on to do their own things. Something that from a character
development standpoint, is welcome, but when it needs to be done six times,
takes a long time to do. It is interesting though how in the first chapter the
most interesting characters were Bill, and Ben. The most interesting characters
in this chapter are Richie and Eddie, who coincidentally also provide most of
the comic relief. There are plenty of computer-generated effects in this movie.
If it weren’t for the multitudinous amount of fantastical episodes, I could
point to this movie as a good way to use special effects to develop character.
Then things get weird. It think
Stephen King may have smoking a good deal of peyote when he wrote the ending to
IT. There are giant turtles and weird rituals and at least one scene that would
be very very illegal if it was adapted for the movie screen. The movie doesn’t
get as weird as the book, but it certainly does get weird. I’m glad for it even
though the weirdness makes the ending a whole bunch of nonsense. I rather they
did it this way, got as close to the weirdness in the book, without breaking any
laws, then to see something stupidly simplistic. The ending is not going to work
either way because IT never really makes any realistic sort of sense. At least
then you can make the climax memorably weird.
One last general observation: What
is a movie star anymore? This is a very good cast with leading actors who I
have seen in many movies. But is any one of them what you think of when you
think of a movie star? Do we have movie stars anymore? The biggest movies out
there are franchises with giant casts (James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain’s biggest
movies sales-wise were in the X-Men franchise). Who do we have left that is a genuine
movie star the way that Humphrey Bogart or John Wayne were movie stars? Perhaps
Tom Cruise, Leonardo Dicaprio, and Brad Pitt. But they are all getting
relatively old. Do we have any young movie stars? Such a thing has perhaps been
lost with the general splintering of entertainment and culture.
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