It Chapter Two (2019)

Score: 4 / 5

Sometimes it's best to stick with the basics. After a fabulous first outing, I was so excited for the finale. Rumors were flying about its length, its depth, its horror. And while the new film does indeed deliver on these fronts -- it's a hell of a lot of fun, surprisingly emotional, and spooky to boot -- it also suffers from unnecessary changes from the source material, awkward pacing, an undercooked screenplay, and a terrible title.

Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. We see the infamous, pulled-from-the-headlines opening scene of the novel in which Adrian Mellon, a gay man enjoying the Derry carnival (but apparently not enjoying Meg Ryan's hair), is brutally attacked by local bigots. The camera, thankfully, doesn't shy away from the assault, and we're reintroduced to Derry with a bang -- rather more of a crunch as the bullies punch and kick Adrian. It's a deeply disturbing scene, watching the asthmatic victim gasping for air before he is thrown into the river. Scenes like this -- in which the townspeople of Derry are demonstrably as evil as (perhaps more evil than) Pennywise -- are what make the book so memorable and horrifying. Unfortunately, these are also the hardest to capture on film, where the bogeyman is the moneymaker.

But, though this opening made me wonder how violent It Chapter Two would be, it's about as brutal as the movie gets. Sure, there's a vicious assault on the adult Beverly by her husband, there's Stan's sudden suicide, but the film really skims the surface of the real horrors lurking in Derry. Instead, the film tries to plant one foot in these physical dangers and the other in a pseudo-psychological world of perception, memory, and trauma. While arguably designed in the spirit of the novel (flashbacks and memories flood into adult consciousness in sudden and sometimes unexpected ways), the bizarre marriage of youth and maturity, of memory and reality, make the horror here less rooted in the body and more in the mind.

Thus we have what amounts to a madcap comedy, but in the horror genre. A parade of psychos and freaks and aggressively weird imagery floods the screen for nearly three hours, making the film an exercise in endurance for the audience. It's also an exercise in parsing the often oblique editing: we get many scenes with the kid-versions of the characters, but it's not always clear if it's a real memory, a perceived memory, or perhaps simply a hallucination brought on by panic, fear, and IT.

And, frankly, this film would have worked just fine relying solely on the adults. I understand the thematic importance of working through trauma, but we would have understood that because this is a sequel. We don't need to be constantly bashed over the head with new scenes of childhood terror at the hands of Pennywise -- that's what the whole first movie was about! (And I was especially irked that the new kiddo scenes are not based on the text anyway.) Rather, we could have had a totally adult movie that included more adult scares: Pennywise the second time around should be able to scare the adults as much as he had the children, but this movie makes it seem as though the adults are only scared because they remember him being terrifying.

A final complaint: the damn script is so romanticized (and torn between impulses and focus points) it's hard to really take the movie on its own terms because -- after only one viewing, admittedly -- I don't know what those terms are. The first chapter (God, I hate the "chapter" designation in the title, did I mention?) was a straightforward coming-of-age story that dealt with those horrors. Great. That makes sense. This time around, you'd think the Losers are either a) still coming of age, or b) aged and working with age-appropriate horrors. Instead we get c) a strange mix of the two, with almost none of the book's deep knowledge of adult issues rooted in childhood trauma. What do I mean? Let's go....

Henry Bowers becomes a random madman tossed into two or three scenes to add a scare, but we are given virtually no insight into his story, his character, or his own trauma. Pennywise himself is a very different character here, preying on emotional instability and desperation more than fear itself; at one point, he even describes himself as having "missed" the Losers in a strange masochistic monologue. Bill is a clear stand-in for Stephen King himself, who makes a sizable cameo, but his wife is notably absent from the proceedings; Beverly's husband similarly disappears after his early scene; these changes make the Losers appear still childlike, not in real adult relationships. Similarly, Richie takes on what is essentially Eddie's character in the book, that is, that he's gay and been closeted his whole life. While this would seem to act as a nice mirror to the opening hate crime, Richie of course does not get to fulfill his apparent lifelong crush on Eddie because (SPOILER ALERT) Eddie dies at the end. Then again, no version of this story was ever meant to have a happy ending.

*Speaking of queerness, I just have to add that this film is pretty queer. One lovely flashback hints a bit more at Richie's queerness. While I was bothered at first that they switched the closet case from Eddie to Richie, I think I like this better: they really made it work with Richie's caustic humor, and then it pairs nicely with Eddie's mama's-boy-ness. But perhaps the most unexpected and fabulous scene in the movie comes from Richie's confrontation with Pennywise on the Derry green space. With the hyper-masculine statue of Paul Bunyan on one side and the hyper-feminine cheerleaders practicing their routine on the other, Richie is caught in the middle, watching Pennywise floating toward him under an upside-down balloon pyramid singing about his "secret". Wow. It's an amazing high-camp moment of pure frisson, heightened by the hint that Derry passerby can also see the proceedings (they freeze and watch in the background).

Perhaps the two most egregious oversights I see in this romanticized script, however, concern Stan and Derry itself. First, of course, it's Stan's death that first horrifies the adult Losers. But by the film's denouement, we learn that Stan wrote letters to his friends letting them know he sacrificed himself partly due to fear but mostly to unite them into a common purpose in confronting Pennywise. What? That's on par with 13 Reasons Why levels of glorifying suicide. The whole point should be that Pennywise's horror was so traumatic that Stan couldn't bear the idea of returning. And then there's the town of Derry, so wicked and corrupt, which escapes totally unscathed by the end of this movie, lit in warm tones and a slight Hallmark-channel-esque haze in a final skyward shot. Again, what? In the novel, the town is mostly flooded in yet another cataclysmic event, as the psychic battle between the Losers and Pennywise basically explodes the sewer system and overloads the canal: the shit Derry doled out is returned in typical King fashion. I wanted some comeuppance, dammit!

Despite my irritations, this movie (I'm not using that title again) is thoroughly entertaining. A spectacular cast delivers on all fronts, and I found myself crying as much as gasping as they faced their fears. The movie is filled with lovely genre Easter eggs, most notably to The Shining and The Thing. Even the climactic battle, filled with some eye-popping and mind-bending visuals a la Mysterio in this summer's MCU flick, doesn't disappoint, and the Pennywise spider makes a vast improvement on its 1990 miniseries counterpart.

There is so much packed into this movie that I'll need to go again. And I'll hope, too, for a supercut of both parts with the much-teased deleted scenes added back in. (I heard they filmed the burning of the Black Spot and perhaps other Derry disasters, and I'm so ready for them all.)