Seen it? What did you think? Post about it here. Spoilers are to be expected here.
Just got back. Dying to hear what you all thought.
Me?
Boy, I know it's the most cliche thing but...book's better.
I loved it.
Loved it too!
I liked it too. I just read the book about a month ago, so there were a few things pretty fresh in my mind that I missed (primarily Mike's parents, and I felt like Stan didn't get much play in the movie). But there were lots of cool nods to the book too. The picture of the woman with the baby by the well, stuff like that. And I liked spotting the Tim Curry Pennywise in the clown room.
I thought Pennywise's lair was also a really nice update. The kids all floating. And the new Pennywise was good too. The first meeting between Ben and Bev was really good too.
Overall, I definitely enjoyed it. I think the book is just such an immersive, lengthy experience that I liked quite a bit, and living up to those qualities in a movie is hard.
I have some complaints, sure, which I'll flesh out in an upcoming article, but my criticisms have a lot to do with the treatment of Mike. They fucked up there, I thought.
Bev and Richie and, of course, Pennywise were the standouts.
Really excellent movie.
Obviously the book's better, yes.
I'll be honest except for The Rock fight and the depiction of Pennywise I was generally disappointed. I felt like they gave Bev too much screen time at the expense of other characters and it just seems like if they're going to have a two-and-a-half-hour movie about the first half of the book everyone could have been a little more developed.
I was really disappointed when they said Mike's dad was dead. He was actually a good adult in the book.
Pretty much always the book is better. Sometimes I think you have to view movies as separate entities to their original source. The shining for example: the book is on another level but the movie is great in it's own right (likewise Misery, Coraline, Fight club etc) Of course there are plenty of movies from books that get it so wrong. In my experience it helps if you haven't just read the book before you watch the movie. I read IT when I was thirteen so there are plenty of things I have forgotten. Sure there were moments that could have been different (Bev didn't get kidnapped in the book, right?) but it's a very fun version of the book. I enjoyed the humour, the brutality, the darkness and the eighties nostalgia.
Yeah, that's very true. It's like eating a decent meal after eating a great one. It's just not as good.
I don't think it was the differences that bothered me, the details. I'm a comic book fan, and you're totally right, there's no way to watch comic book movies if you're going to run down a checklist of things that are the same and different. I think it was that, overall, the book had a big effect on me, and the movie didn't hit me as hard. Which isn't a legitimate critique of the movie, just a statement of how it didn't do the same thing for me.
The move to the 80's was interesting. What's going on with the 80's-centric horror? Stranger Things, IT. There was Super 8, which was '79. Right now I'm reading My Best Friend's Exorcism, which is very 80's centric. What's the deal with that?
I think 80s nostalgia is a general trend at the moment, not just in the horror genre, maybe it's just that the adults who were 80s kids are now the prime age for dreaming about the past (and spending money on it) and the next generation are being re-served modern versions of eighties classics (Flatliners...why?!?)
Regarding your comment about Stan's lack of screen time; it makes me wonder if this is because of his fate, in that I guess he has a smaller part to play in part two, although contradictory imo you would think they would want to show just how much the events traumatized him and scared him to justify his reaction.
Also I had originally wondered if the decision to make Ben the historian rather than Mike, meant that it would be Ben who stayed in Derry as librarian. However from the interview I read yesterday it sounds like Mike is still going to be the one who stays, only he's also going to be quite "messed up" in the future - a junkie in fact. What do you guys think to that change?
I WAS WONDERING THAT TOO! After seeing Part I, I wondered if Ben would stay in Derry. It seemed like that's where they were going, what with Ben being a history nerd and all.
It seems like Mike being a junky is different. Although in the book it was pretty explicit that the others who left Derry became pretty successful while Mike didn't, and it was suggested that the others were successful because they left while Mike wasn't because he stayed. So it does stretch that concept, but I guess it seems like maybe a shortcut to showing that gap in success(?)
And I suppose it would mess a person up pretty badly to stay in Derry.
