It: Chapter One is probably the best book to movie adaptation I have ever seen, except for maybe the Harry Potter movies, and even then it's a better adaptation than even those are, if we're just talking about them as adaptations rather than the respective genres they're in. I'm not a fan of horror movies. In fact this is the first actual horror movie I've ever seen. I've seen scary movies like Goosebumps, but nothing that's straight up horror. It's not something that I grew up with, and it's not really a genre I'm interested in. But I read the 1986 Stephen King novel It about a year or two ago and I really enjoyed it, so I thought I'd give the movie a try.
One of the things that I appreciate about this movie is that they didn't try to tell the whole story in one movie. The copy of the book that I have runs at 1,157 pages though typically it's around 1,138, depending on the print size. So to try to cram that much story into a single movie would probably have made the movie longer than Avengers: Endgame and that's way too long for a horror movie. So the fact they had the foresight to split the movie up into two parts is pretty amazing. Two hours and fourteen minutes is actually a pretty decent length, but anything over that would be a little too much.
The cast is pretty amazing. And I actually recognized some of the actors playing the Losers Club. I mean you have Jack Dylan Grazer, who I've seen in Shazam! as well as a short lived comedy called Me, Myself, and I, as Eddie, Finn Wolfhard, from Stranger Things, as Richie, Sophia Lillis, who's in the Netflix series I Am Not Okay with This, as well as playing Nancy Drew in the 2019 film Nancy Drew, as Beverly, and Chosen Jacobs, who I saw in the second season of the series, God Friended Me, as Mike. I haven't seen the actors who played Bill, Ben, Stan, or Henry Bowers in anything before, but regardless, the entire cast was absolutely phenomenal in their roles. Including Bill Skarsgard as It/Pennywise the Dancing Clown.
One of things I heard about before this movie came out was how worried people were that Skarsgard wouldn't be as good as Tim Curry had been as the character in the 1990 TV mini-series. I've never seen the mini-series so I don't know how Skarsgard compares to Tim Curry as Pennywise. I just know that the character is so iconic that people weren't happy with the change for the then upcoming movie. Since then I've avoided most reviews of the movie just so that the only preconceived notions I'd have were my own just having read the book. Like I said, I've never seen the mini-series, so I really can't compare the two versions. However, having read the book, I thought Skarsgard did a really good job at bringing Pennywise to life on the screen.
Going into the movie I thought I was going to have a pretty visceral reaction to it, like I had when I saw The War of the Worlds, the 2005 movie with Tom Cruise in it. For some reason I had a really bad reaction to that movie, but last night, despite watching It: Chapter One by myself, I enjoyed it. And I think that's because there are moments of levity and friendship intertwined with the moments of sheer terror. You get to know these kids before they go off to fight It at the end of the movie and you see them in lighter situations that make you like them before you see them in the horror setting.
While the book was set in 1958 for the sections about the characters as kids, and the mini-series has it set in 1960, the film is set in 1988 when Georgie goes missing, and 1989 for the rest of it. In 2017 the '80s was hugely popular because of shows like Stranger Things and The Goldbergs (more Stranger Things for this though), and it still plays into the 27 to 30 year stretch of time for the modern day setting for the 2019 sequel, It: Chapter Two. At one point in the film the kids are by the Derry movie theatre and on the marquee at the top it shows Batman, which is cool because this movie is set during the summer of 1989 and that was when Batman was out in theatres. So I liked the period accurate setting of the movie.
I think my favourite part of the movie was when the gang were in their underwear, having gone swimming in the river and were drying off in the sun. Beverly is lying there, in her underwear as well and the boys are doing their best to be respectful of her, while at the same time being curious about her body in that early teenager way that we're all curious at that age. Which is interesting to see since most movies starring teenagers have older teens who are just about to graduate from high school and are old enough to drive. This movie though felt more like The Goonies and Stand by Me where you have a group of kids riding around town on bicycles. Which is really cool to me. Just that scene is what really made me like these kids.
I also like the scene where Ben meets Beverly for the first time and she catches him listening to New Kids on the Block. For some reason that brought Full House and Fuller House to mind since DJ and Kimmy are huge fans of New Kids on the Block on both shows. As is Erica on The Goldbergs. Ben is embarrassed about liking them, but Beverly thinks it's cute and then later subtly teases him about it without letting the other members of the group discover his guilty pleasure band when they go to Ben's house to get the information on Derry that he's gathered from the library.
There weren't a ton of special effects in most of the movie. In fact, I think the most CGI I saw in the movie was during the final battle against It. And even then it was really hard to tell what was CGI and what were practical effects, if anything. Which isn't something we get with movies these days. I mean, JJ Abrams used practical effects in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but most of the time the visual effects are all CGI. Not always, but most of the time.
If I had to give this movie any negatives is that we don't find out that much about Ben at all in this movie. Everyone else is pretty much how they are in the book, but if I remember correctly, we spend a lot more time with Ben in the book than we do in the movie. The only reason we go to his house in the movie is because he's the one with the information on Derry's history, and the clues to discovering what It/Pennywise is and where It/Pennywise is located when he's not tormenting them. But otherwise, we don't see his parents or learn anything about his circumstances aside from he's the new kid in town and that's it. Like I said, it's been about two years since I read the book, but I'm pretty sure we know more about Ben in the book than we do here in the movie.
Final Thoughts and Rating: Overall I really enjoyed It: Chapter One. It was scary, but not too scary, it was fun, and it had amazing characters. It made me want to read the book again and it has me excited to see the sequel ASAP. The tricky part is going to be what my rating is going to be. I really enjoyed the movie and there was nothing that really took me out of the film, but no movie is perfect. There was a scene that looked a little too dark for me to really see what was going on, though that was just the opening sequence with Georgie, before he meets Pennywise, so I didn't actually need to really see anything. So I think I'm going to give It: Chapter One a solid 8.5/10 stars.
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