It (2017)

Release Date: September 8, 2017


What's It About: The small town of Derry, Maine (fictitious town) is terrorized by a being that preys on the fear of humans, primarily children. 'It' refers to the entity, which manifests itself to its victims in a series of different physical forms to maximize the fear it instils, primarily as a clown named Pennywise.


The Good: It taps into the power of the childhood imagination and the way we interpret and project our fears onto the world. The film is sufficiently creepy and morbid, and I was certainly recalling numerous irrational fears I would conjure up as a child and now, as an adult, wonder how they shaped me as I entered later life. It does a good job of adapting the 1985 novel, and whilst some of the salient points are not present, there are plenty of Stephen King easter eggs to find.


The Bad: As with many scary monster films, it gets less scary as it progresses. The more we see and understand Pennywise the Clown, the less scary he seems to be. There's also a higher emphasis on the tonal shift once Beverly joins the club in the film than in the book, which you may see as a Hollywood potshot on the romance angle.


Best Performance: It's difficult not to compare this performance with Tim Curry's 1990 iteration of the character, but Bill Skarsgård wins as the titular It. Portraying an psychopathic alien clown isn't easy, but Bill completely dissolves into his character and suddenly Pennywise seems more like the actor playing himself rather than being played by someone else. During production, the actor was kept isolated from the children actors until their performances so that the uncertainty was boosted and the performances were made slightly more real.


Should I Watch It: If you had a wild imagination as a kid and came up with lots of insane conspiracy theories and rationales to why things happened, this film will serve to be a fictional confirmation of all that you believed. This film taps into that unexplainable energy and it will increase its impact if that's relevant to you.


Post-Credits Scene: Yes... sort of. It's narratively relevant but nothing revolutionary


Similar Films: The Goonies (1985), The It Miniseries (1990), Super 8 (2011)


Trailer: