Ive been a Stephen King fan for most of my life, but i only read the novel "It" when i was in college. waited a long time. And it was too bad, because I decided to watch the TV adaptation of Stephen King's "It" a year or so later. There's no way a movie, let alone a movie edited for TV, could live up to the gory spectacle of that book. So of course I compared the TV adaptation to the book and found it seriously lacking. It's really not fair to compare a movie directly with the book like that. It's never going to be able to live up to whatever you can imagine in your head while reading the book. Back then i was notoriously hard on movie adaptations of books. I watched the movie version of "The Color Purple" for a class, and I procrastinated reading the book until the night before I watched the movie, and I was so furious at everything that had been changed that I hated the movie for years. I can now appreciate the movie for what it is, but it took years for me to get to that point. since it's now b3en almost 20 years since I read the book, it's safer for me to watch the miniseries now, because I'll be able to take it in with fresh eyes and a fresh mind that isn't comparing every scene to what transpired in my head when I read the book. I repeat: send in the clowns.
Where have you been if you don't know what happened in "It" by now? Nevertheless, I will try to recap it for you. Back in 1960, in the little town of Derry, Maine, seven 12 year olds who are outcasts in school for various reasons, band together to fight an evil demonic force known simply as "It," that manifests itself most often as a creepy clown known as Pennywise the clown. The seven friends fight bravely and strongly as they can, and they think they have defeated It, but they make a pact that if they ever find out that It isn't really dead, they will come back to fight It and defeat it again once and for all. Thirty years later, six of them have left town and scattered around the world, but one of them remained back in town to keep watch over the town and alert the others if there's ever a sign that It has come back. A string of child disappearances and murders with Pennywis's signature signal to Mike, the one who stayed behind and became a librarian, that It is back and stronger than ever. Mike calls the rest, and most of them heed their promise to come back and fight It, but will they be able to defeat It or will the demonic force destroy them?
The new movie versions of "It" move the timeline up so the 12 year olds who fight It are in 1990 instead of 1960, because now it's been 30 years since the 90s (yes, I feel old). Those movies, with all their special effects, just fell flat for me and failed to capture the fear i felt while reading the novel "It." Of those movies, with their millions of dollars in their budgets, couldn't capture my imagination and scare me the way the book did, this movie doesn't stand a chance. I mean, while i was reading the book and i got to the part where one of the characters is walking across a bridge and It reaches up and grabs his foot, i was lying in bed and one of my blankets fell and touched my foot, and i almost had a heart attack. There's nothing in any of these films that can live up to that fear i felt back then, and it's really not fair to expect a movie to be able to do that, but there have been movies that have scared me as much as that moment with the blanket scared me, and this movie just isn't able to do that. The special effects aren't as special as I'd like them to be, but it's not even that, because the special effects in the new versions are full of big budget effects, and I still didn't like them.
Maybe it's just that nothing will ever live up to my expectations since the movie that played in my head while I read the book is so much scarier than anything will ever be onscreen. The actors do their best with the material they are given, and some of them turn in great performances (Annette O'toole in particular dies a great job as the adult Beverly) but I still found myself yawning and checking the clock. Tim Curry is always great in everything he does, even when I just don't like the movie (I'm looking at you, "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." Yes, I know, blasphemy, but I don't like that movie either, though I appreciate what it was trying to do, and I love Tim Curr's performance in it). As always, I appreciated what this movie was trying to do, but it just didn't scare me, and the giant spider at the end is absolutely ridiculous, with all due respect to the special effects team. The giant spiders in that terrible movie "Arachnia" look better than this. Overall, this movie still falls flat for me and ill never be able to recapture the fun the book brought me being scared. Poo. I'll say this; it's not as bad as i remember it being, but it's still a miss for me.
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