It (2017)
In this day and age, it's nearly impossible not to anticipate an iconic horror property from the 20th century to be given the remake treatment. The fundamental reason is fairly obvious: if audiences are familiar with a certain story and the characters who inhabit it -- especially the villain -- it's a sure thing they will flock to the theater to witness a modernized interpretation that will reintroduce them to the material using the advantage of updated technology. The best of the remakes will refuse to coast solely on the power of nostalgia and offer a unique take that distinguishes themselves from their source material and therefore justify their existence; the worst will offer a reheated carbon copy whose raison d'etre is to suck your wallet dry and laugh themselves all the way to the box office.
There is a distinct difference, however, between remaking genre entries along the lines of Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Psycho, and that of Stephen King's It: the aforementioned titles refer to big-screen, definitive masterpieces in the horror genre. Movies that didn't demand a remake, but rather were so successful at defining their genre and scaring the wits out of audiences that they produced an itch for contemporary reinterpretation that was too powerful for filmmakers to resist scratching. The latter title, on the other hand, refers to a horror film that, despite having achieved classic status among horror buffs, never acquired a theatrical production. The original adaptation of Stephen King's 1986 supernatural horror novel is a two-part miniseries made in 1990, and while it introduced the world to one of the genre's most nightmarish creations, brought to life with a mixture of skin-crawling terror and scenery-chewing humor by the unsurpassable Tim Curry, it remains a dated piece of work, unable to escape the confines of its telemovie restrictions on gore and profane language. In other words, It is a horror movie that could actually use a remake, namely a big-screen adaptation that permits Pennywise the Dancing Clown the freedom to really show off his razor-sharp teeth and chow down on the flesh of innocent children, as opposed to just threatening to do so or being cheated of his money shot by a gore-conscious editor.
Ironically enough, much like how Pennywise hibernates for a period of 27 years in between his rampages throughout the town of Derry, Maine, it took 27 years after Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen's original miniseries before horror fans were treated to a proper Hollywood production, penned by Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, and Gary Dauberman, and directed by Andy Muschietti. Even more ironically, I am embarrassed to report that their attempt at a modernized, R-rated adaptation of one of the Master of Horror's most revered literary works makes Wallace and Cohen's telemovie look like a masterpiece by comparison. While they may have been contractually forbidden from cutting loose with graphic carnage as per ABC's requirements, at least they understood how to generate a true sensation of horror. Wallace and Cohen compensated for their shortage of eye-popping visual effects and stomach-turning gore with generous servings of suspense, exhibiting keen knowledge of the irrational fears that plague the subconscious of children: thunderstorms, the dark unknowns lurking within our own basements, the struggle to be understood and believed by our parents. By contrast, Muschietti's remake is given the opportunity to indulge in the bloody injuries and state-of-the-art special effects denied to Wallace and Cohen's adaptation, and the director overdoses on his big-budget privileges to the detriment of any authentic sense of terror.
Instead of framing the first half of King's story as a flashback visualized from the memories of the seven surviving members of the self-titled "Loser's Club," Palmer, Fukunaga, and Dauberman adopt a more straightforward approach, splitting the narrative into two separate movies, both told in chronological order. For their initial screenplay, they zero in on the Losers during their childhood. Credit where it's due, this is definitely preferable to the original's decision to cut back and forth between the protagonists as children bound together by a common enemy, and as adults living separate lives before being summoned back together by the member who never left Derry.
On a rainy afternoon in October 1988, in the quaint, small town of Derry, Maine, 12-year-old Bill Denbrough (Jaeden Martell) is crafting a paper sailboat for his six-year-old brother, Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott), while (allegedly) recovering from a cold in his bedroom. Going outside in the rainstorm by himself, Georgie places the boat on the soaked street and joyfully chases after it as it glides along the water, only to helplessly watch as it falls down a sewer drain. Crouching down in front of the sewer, Georgie is confronted by a mysterious clown who introduces himself as Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard). Initially frightened by the emergence of a clown living in the sewer, Georgie is quickly disarmed by his friendliness and promises of a carnival down below. While Georgie is shrewd enough to be wary of strangers, Pennywise successfully tempts him to reach an arm out to reclaim his sailboat, reminding him of how upset Bill will be if he returns home without it, and when he reaches far enough, Pennywise grabs his arm and bites it off before dragging him down the drain and into the sewer.
Once the moment of truth arrives, Muschietti lays waste to the telemovie tameness of the original. There, Curry grabbed Tony Dakota's arm, provoking him to scream, and the camera zoomed in for a close-up of the former's pearly whites before dissolving to Georgie's funeral. Here, Muschietti takes advantage of the R-rating and leaves little to his audience's imagination, displaying Pennywise's teeth as they clamp down on Georgie's arm. Editor Jason Ballantine then cleverly shifts to the perspective of a cat watching from the safety of a window across the street -- one innocent creature bearing witness to the gruesome demise of another. Unwilling to cut the carnage there, Muschietti and Ballantine return to Georgie, bleeding profusely from the socket of a missing arm as he desperately tries to crawl away from the sewer, crying and screaming for help. A gloved hand emerges from the opening, grabs hold of his leg, and drags him down as his cry for Bill echoes into the air, leaving behind a trail of blood. It's a moment of shocking violence, appropriately bloody without veering into exploitation, that alerts viewers early that this is no made-for-TV production and not even adorable children are safe from the evil plaguing this town. Unfortunately, this reveals itself as a promise for a hardcore, no-holds-barred brand of terror that the remainder of the movie is unable to recreate or surpass.
The following summer, Bill is still grieving the sudden disappearance of his little brother. His parents have resolved themselves to the likeliness of their youngest son's death, but Bill is desperate to believe in the possibility, far-fetched as it may sound, that Georgie is still alive, waiting to be rescued and reunited with his family. Rather than spend the summer having fun like kids are expected to do, Bill summons his small circle of best friends -- Richie Tozier (Finn Wolfhard), Eddie Kaspbrak (Jack Dylan Grazer), and Stan Uris (Wyatt Oleff) -- to gather at the barrens and explore the sewer system, where he believes Georgie went missing. And he isn't the only one. Many children in town have disappeared without a trace as well, and none of the adults seem to want to acknowledge it. Along the journey for answers, Bill and his friends welcome three more preteen outcasts into their club: Mike Hanlon (Chosen Jacobs), the only black kid recently moved into Derry, Ben Hanscom (Jeremy Ray Taylor), an overweight, friendless bookworm who uses the library as a sanctuary from a gang of bullies led by the dangerously unhinged Henry Bowers (Nicholas Hamilton), and Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis), the solo female who elicits the attraction of Bill and Ben, and is being sexually abused by her alcoholic father.
One by one, each member of the newly formed Loser's Club finds themselves being targeted by vivid manifestations of their worst nightmares. Through extensive research conducted by Ben, they learn that every 27 years, an extraterrestrial creature who typically assumes the form of a clown and resides in the sewers of Derry wakens from his sleep and feasts upon the flesh of children, exploiting their innermost fears to dismantle their sense of safety before abducting them into the cold, wet blackness of its home. With nobody besides each other to confide in and depend on, the seven Losers band together and bravely resolve to track Pennywise down in his feeding ground and put a stop to his reign of terror, forming an unbreakable bond and confronting their own individual fears in the process.
Beyond the cold open that shocks with its graphic depiction of the murder of a child, Andy Muschietti's rendition of It is a tonal mishmash that neglects to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by its R-rating and Hollywood-sized budget. The trio of screenwriters deploy the type of ball-busting, smart-alecky banter common among groups of preteen male best friends to relieve instances of tension. If ever a conversation takes a turn into the serious, Richie will chime in with a quip about the alleged superiority of his penis size, or imply that he's the only member of the club to have lost his virginity. In practice, what these asides accomplish is diluting any attempts at constructing and maintaining dread, instead creating the distinct feel of a PG kiddie monster movie suitable for the Disney channel. Muschietti and his writers clearly aim to emulate the atmosphere of 80s nostalgia and the magic of childhood friendship epitomized by Stand by Me, itself an adaptation of a Stephen King novella, with their sequences of team bonding and sentimental group hugs. Unfortunately, the acting from the central young cast isn't collectively strong enough to either warm the heart or release the floodgates.
On that note, the performances around which It revolves are largely unimpressive across the board. None of the young actors stand out. It would be a stretch to assert that any of the kids in Wallace's adaptation submitted a star-making performance either. In particular, Seth Green, while effective at portraying the goofball comedian his character would evolve into, struggled to communicate a convincing feeling of fear. However, their efforts were uniformly preferable to those of their contemporary counterparts, projecting far greater charisma, maturity, emotional authenticity, and group chemistry. As the ostensible leader of the Losers Club, Jaeden Martell fails to convey the heart-wrenching grief of a 12-year-old approaching the murky waters of adulthood while holding on to the childlike optimism to reunite with his younger brother, covering his lack of dramatic profundity behind a whispery stutter. I understand that the stutter is a condition that the character is afflicted with, but it feels like Martell uses it more as a crutch than an impediment. And his speech about the necessity of confronting Pennywise rather than ignoring him like everyone else in town is neither inspiring nor moving.
Unintentionally borrowed from the tonally and narratively similar sci-fi horror series, Stranger Things, Finn Wolfhard is brought onboard to supply the comic relief as Richie "The Trash Mouth" Tozier. However, that supposed "comic relief" comes in the form of repetitive F-bomb-dropping and misplaced one-liners. As Stan recounts an event in which he was attacked by the deformed female figure of a painting, Richie asks, "Was she hot?" Following the temporary defeat of Pennywise, he flippantly states, "I know what I'm doing for my summer experience essay." As the sole Jewish member of his club, Wyatt Oleff's line readings are flat and squeaky, and his dramatic outburst after being nearly killed and feeling abandoned by his best friends comes across as cringey in its whininess. (On the plus side, I appreciate that the writers toned down the level of his stereotypical cowardice that Wallace and Cohen overindulged in to the point of offensiveness.) As the token black guy of the club, Chosen Jacobs is shortchanged, handed little to do besides stand back and make a series of credibly horrified facial expressions at disturbing sights. Nicholas Hamilton goes way over the top as Henry Bowers, the ringleader of a gang of wannabe thugs whose entire existence is devoted to terrorizing powerless boys much smaller than them. Where Kiefer Sutherland used a tranquil voice and imperishable composure to paint a refreshingly understated portrait of teenage villainy as Ace Merrill, Hamilton lacks the skill to imbue his similar role with that level of nuance, widening his eyes, screaming demands at the top of his lungs, and at one point, baaing like a sheep for no reason. Jeremy Ray Taylor's primary function is to provide exposition about the long-standing disappearances of the residents of Derry -- a task as bland in delivery as it is in its writing. As the sexualized female of the club, Sophia Lillis plays Beverly with a cool-girl energy: down-to-earth, nonjudgmental, and enriched with a charming smile of self-deprecation. At home, however, that personality submerges beneath a frozen shell of paralyzing fear and submission when confronted by her father... that is, until she unveils an inner ferocity that enables her to stand up to him for the first time in her life.
Palmer, Fukunaga, and Dauberman lack the crucial ability to craft fully developed individuals worth fearing and rooting for. In particular, the adults and authority figures are uniformly written off as caricatures. Because It is told from the perspectives of children, perhaps these skin-and-bones characterizations are by design. Are they an objective view of the adults' personalities, or a subjective reflection of how their children interpret them? Judging by Muschietti's unambiguous, unsubtle style of storytelling, my guess is the former. Sonia Kaspbrak (Molly Atkinson), the single (can't imagine why) mother of Eddie, is as monstrous on the outside as she appears on the inside. Obese to a degree that almost looks cartoonish, and deformed further by a pair of oversized bifocals, Sonia takes the concept of an overprotective parent to a disturbing level. She dotes creepily on her son to the point of suggesting an incestuous relationship, forbids him from spending any more time with his best friends, deceives him into believing he suffers from an undefined illness that requires him to always carry an inhaler, and, at her nicest, forces him to plant a kiss on her cheek in front of Bill and Richie -- provoking one of the latter's more spontaneous remarks. As Beverly's single father, Alvin, Stephen Bogaert portrays a most lazily conspicuous child predator. From the second he appears on-camera, there's not a shred of decency, affection, or mystique to this man. He's the most in-your-face rapist you could ever hope to not meet, forcing Bev to remind him that she's "still [his] little girl," wrapping his hands tightly around her face and sniffing her hair, and invariably delivering his menacing lines in a low, lustful voice.
Similar to the female bullies in Kimberly Peirce's remake of Carrie, apart from Chris Hargensen and Sue Snell, the secondary members of the Bowers gang lack distinguishable personalities. They're nothing more than Henry's sidekicks, standing by his side and blindly aiding him in his torment of the Losers Club. Belch Huggins (Jake Sim) is nicknamed as such because that's exactly what he does... literally one time, in Eddie's ear. At least in the original, as one-note as his character still was, he did it frequently to earn his nickname. Also, he was given a definitive and unsettling fate. Here, Belch and Victor Criss (Logan Thompson), a bleach-blond, pale-skinned, scrawny, line-free extra looking oddly effeminate for someone running around with such a vicious gang, disappear from the story as though clumsily forgotten by the writers. As for Henry, his characterization isn't markedly fuller. Aside from being the most likely of his gang to graduate into a full-blown serial killer, going as far as to carve his name into the fleshy stomach of Ben with his trusty switchblade, nothing distinguishes him from his friends, except for maybe a mullet. Henry is a one-dimensional psychopath, and the closest we get to a psychological motivation is that his policeman father, Butch (Stuart Hughes), is emotionally abusive toward him, and so Henry must pass the buck onto those weaker. How original and unexpected and enlightening!
If nothing else, the remake of It is beautifully shot by cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon, who uses aerial shots to capture the deceptively picturesque scenery of Derry, Maine, a small town whose green trees and perpetually shining sun mask the supernatural, child-snatching evil lurking beneath the sewers. At one point, Chung-hoon uses a Dutch tilt to emphasize Bev's disorientation after she wakes up in the sewer and staggers to her feet. Streaks of sun shine through windows and down on the actors as they bicycle through their neighborhood. Once the warmth and comfort of sunlight subside as the protagonists descend into the pitch-black isolation of the sewer, flashlights become their only source of light -- a visual that Muschietti returns to throughout the story ad nauseam.
The running time for It is 135 minutes, far too long and pretentious for a simple "kids vs. monster" tale, and nothing in Muschietti's plodding direction argues to the contrary. His pace is punishingly slow, draining the required apprehension from his string of hallucinatory horror sequences, all of which rely on repetitive cliches: flickering lights, doors predictably slamming shut on their own accord, ominously slow zoom-ins on a wall of blackness, Pennywise popping into frame for an all-too telegraphed jump scare. As for the preteen actors subjected to these tactics, Muschietti relegates them to standing statically in the background or on the side of the frame, editor Ballantine cutting to reaction shots of them stopping dead in their tracks and gazing in open-mouthed, incomprehensible horror.
In the original, Wallace and Cohen tailored the supernatural manifestations to the characters' specific anxieties. For Ben, that meant seeing his deceased father gradually transform into a laughing Pennywise. For Bill, it entailed Georgie winking at him in a photo album, which then began to leak blood, but his parents were unable to see it. For Richie, it necessitated a confrontation with a werewolf in his school's basement after seeing I Was a Teenage Werewolf at the movies. Up close, the werewolf wasn't scary-looking, but Wallace's suspense building leading to that close-up was downright Hitchcockian. In the remake, Muschietti and his writers cobble together an arbitrary succession of blatant hallucinations that lack specificity, suspense, or memorability: Ben is chased around his library by a headless zombie; the painting of a facially distorted woman comes to life and... stands in front of him. There's never a true sense of fear for these characters because it's so obvious these visuals are nothing more than hallucinations.
The rock war set piece illustrates how embarrassingly incompetent Muschietti is at weaving slapstick humor into the real-world horror of bullying. Where Wallace played this crucial sequence straight, pitting one gang of benevolent preteens against another of malevolent, racist hoodlums in a physically violent power struggle, Muschietti considers it an opportunity for fist-pumping, juvenile teen comedy. The resultant marriage -- which includes horrifically misguided rock music, a preposterous lack of bodily injuries despite some characters getting hit in the head with rocks, and Belch yelling in random slow motion, "Fuck you, bitch!" -- is not tense, empowering, or even the slightest bit funny. It's stupid, tonally disordered, and belonging to a different type of movie.
In the titular role of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, a shape-shifting alien who preys on the vulnerabilities of children and possesses the ability to transform into whatever or whoever it desires to disorient or frighten them, Bill Skarsgard packs more bark than bite. There's nothing particularly wrong with his performance. It's not his fault he arrives on the scene automatically under the gargantuan shadow cast by Tim Curry. Even though he was hamstrung by the limitations of a telemovie, and therefore was robbed of the privilege to sink his teeth into any graphic displays of viscera, Curry managed to craft a performance on par with that of Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, bringing dollops of magnetism and a go-for-broke sense of humor to counteract the inhumane sadism that represents the core of Pennywise. Whether out of deference to King's source material or an unwillingness to take it to as dark a place as they're permitted, the screenwriters make the least of their opportunity to bring Pennywise to the big screen for the first time in history in all his R-rated gory glory.
In terms of performance, Skarsgard has a ball terrorizing his younger co-stars, flashing a sinister, toothy grin to complement a suitably clownish laugh and high-pitched, castrato-like voice to disarm his victims. It's a shame Muschietti doesn't trust enough in his star's natural ability to inhabit the role, feeling an obligation to overwhelm Skarsgard's portrayal under mounds of CGI to contort his body or enable him to assume the shape of his target's fears. Javier Botet, one of the most prolific creature actors in modern horror alongside Doug Jones, takes over for Skarsgard in a couple brief scenes as the leper, a rotting, diseased vagrant manifested to gross out Eddie. Skarsgard is also let down by a lame script that supplies him with corny, on-the-nose threats that verbalize his precise intentions ("I'll feast on your flesh as I feed on your fear") yet curiously requires him to pass up numerous opportunities to deliver on them. In the form of Judith the painting, he begins to feed on Stan's face, but when his friends arrive just in time to witness, Pennywise inexplicably decides to back off. Had the filmmakers taken a more hardcore approach to horror and a less faithful one to King, Stan would be dead, his entire face chewed off. An argument could be made that Pennywise deliberately refrains from killing his targets because he wants to instill as profound a sense of fear as possible in them first, tenderizing them. The more afraid they are, the better they'll test. For me, that's just not good enough an excuse to make this sadistic otherworldly villain so generous.
At least Skarsgard gets to enjoy a fantastic costume design that makes enough alterations to distinguish his look from that of Curry. While Curry sported a bush of red hair on the back of his head, Skarsgard's is orange. His suit is less cheerfully colored and more drab -- silver with three red pom-poms adorning the front, and ruffles around the neck, wrists, and shins. His face, including a prominent forehead, is smothered in white greasepaint. A pair of blood-red lines start above his eyes and travel down his cheeks to the corners of his mouth, blending into the same-colored lips. While his nose isn't masked by a big red ball, it is likewise painted the same color. Two rows of razor-sharp teeth protrude from his mouth in the form of a Xenomorph-like alien. A trickle of drool leaks down from his lower lip to signify flesh-fueled hunger. His white gloves are occasionally punctured by clawed, spindly fingers.
The Neibolt house in which Pennywise has taken residence, situated above the sewer system, is constructed in the competent style of a generic haunted house. The outside is towering, dark, dilapidated, and forbidding, standing behind bare, winding trees. On the inside, cobwebs serve as the main choice of decoration, dangling from the ceiling and draped over a piano, along which mice roam freely. Leading down to the sewer is a crumbling well, which provides Pennywise with both a hiding spot and feeding ground while derivatively recalling Samara Morgan's resting place in The Ring. It's especially in the sequences that transpire within this setting where Muschietti seems to intentionally turn his remake into the cinematic equivalent of a haunted attraction. A trio of wooden doors from left to right read, "Not Scary at All," "Scary," and "Very Scary." Upon opening the obvious choice, Muschietti presents a hologram of the upper half of Betty Ripsom's bisected body hanging from her hands, screaming. The flickering lights in a dark, locked room reveal a gallery of clown mannequins. A missing child poster of Richie manifests to falsely foretell his fate. (Again, in the hands of a more ruthless writer, it wouldn't have been an empty threat.) Like a meander through an expensively designed but pathetically hokey haunted house at Six Flags, the sights and sounds are ear-piercing and in-your-face and obnoxious, but not the least bit genuinely frightening. Muschietti's flavor of horror is too loud and technically artificial to slither its way under your skin.
The (anti)climactic battle between the Losers Club and Pennywise, which transpires in the sewer and is intended to double as a therapy session, is dimly lit to the point of visual incoherence. Where the original lucky seven used creative means to defeat Pennywise -- Eddie spraying him in the face with an inhaler falsely claimed to be full of battery acid, and Bev sling-shooting a silver earring into his head -- Ballantine uses fast cutting to present these kids combatting him in the most unimaginative manner possible: beating him with a baseball bat and chains, pouncing on his back. Even though the hits succeed in knocking the creature down, there's zero possibility that they're actually wounding him or bringing him to the edge of death. For that matter, Muschietti instills zero fear that his protagonists aren't going to emerge from the sewer victorious. Pennywise merely tosses them off his back, hurls them across the floor, and in Eddie's case, vomits gutter sludge on his face, but none of them sustain any injuries. In an attempt to collectively purge his characters of their individual fears, Muschietti overdoses on CGI, turning his climax into a flaccid extravaganza of special effects as Pennywise morphs into the appearances of Beverly's father, the leper, the burning arms of Mike's parents, and the animated female painting. Then without rhyme or reason, Pennywise decides to skitter away and crawl back down the well to commence his 27-year hibernation prematurely, the top of his head bursting open before the drop. According to Bill, it's because Pennywise can sense that none of them are sufficiently afraid of him anymore -- a sentiment I could relate to from the beginning. It's blandly chaotic, and lacking in tension, excitement, or a genuine sense of danger.
Given its inherent restraints as a made-for-TV production, there was ample space to improve upon the original adaptation of It. With the advantages of up-to-date technology and the freedom to embrace the unlimited potential afforded by an R rating, Pennywise's first-ever excursion to the big screen had every right to deliver a carnival of nightmarish imagery, bone-chilling suspense, three-dimensional characterization, and pure, spooky fun. Regrettably, Muschietti opts to prioritize the easy extravagance of special effects at the cost of generating an authentic atmosphere of oppressive horror or fleshing out his characters into fully formed individuals. With a troupe of inexperienced actors submitting noncommittal performances, an uninspired script full of cartoonish characterizations and flatly expository dialogue, and a director who lacks the expertise to marry sci-fi horror and emotional trauma with an organic sense of humor, It succeeds only in reinforcing the superiority of its classic 1990 predecessor. Despite its literal displays of sharp teeth and gallons of blood, this theatrical remake, once cleared of the greasepaint, exposes itself as both toothless and bloodless.
4.3/10
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