Two steps forward, one step back.
I can’t recall the last time I saw a movie as frustrating as IT, Chapter Two. This was a movie I was excited for and wanted to like, but it was so unfocused and unsure of itself that every time it did something that truly got to me—made me afraid, made me uncomfortable, made me love the characters all over again—it would do something to ruin the moment.
A perfect example comes in the second act when Beverly Marsh returns to the apartment she lived in with her dad. Instead of her father, she’s greeted by an elderly woman who tells her that her father is dead. She invites Bev in for tea, and things get progressively creepier and creepier. The old woman stutter-steps in the background as Bev explores her old home. She pauses uncomfortably long mid-conversation, and—the coup de grace—she does that strange herky-jerky walk naked in the background while Bev looks at pictures.
It’s a great scene. So good, in fact, that it made the bulk of the trailer. It’s subtle and eerie, it builds suspense, implies menace, and creates an uncanny atmosphere. I’m not one to yell at the screen in a movie theater (in fact, I had to ask a person behind me to stop talking), but man did I wish I could yell “Get out of there, girl!”
And then it all falls apart.
After realizing that this old woman is Pennywise, or at least associated with Pennywise, Bev turns around, and instead of the old lady, we get a rubbery, seven-foot-tall CGI monstrosity that provokes laughter instead of fear. It’s too over the top and it ruins the atmosphere of fear it was building up to. And the stranger part is that it’s almost immediately followed by one of the most effective scenes in the picture: Beverly runs away from the monster lady, and as she runs, the apartment becomes dilapidated and nasty. She reaches the door, but it’s locked. Then she hears a noise. She looks back and there, at the end of the hall in her old room, sits Pennywise in his human form. He talks to her, and while he does that, he applies white grease paint, and at the end, he rakes his nails down his face, creating the red lines that run vertically from the top of his eyes to the bottom of his cheeks. It’s a great scene, but it’s also emblematic of one of the major issues with the movie: it doesn’t know what kind of scary it wants to be.
The movie takes place twenty-seven years after the first chapter. The Losers are all grown up now, and living lives that are both successful and haunted. None of them remember their childhood until Mike Hanlon—the only Loser who stayed in Derry—calls them home to make good on their childhood promise.
The Losers answer the call except one: Stan “The Man” Uris, who elects to commit suicide instead of returning to face IT.
So far so good, right? The movie follows the novel pretty well at this point, even starting with the death of Adrian Mellon, the homosexual man who was beat up by bullies and dumped in the Derry river to die (I bring up his sexuality for a specific reason, not just as an adjective, so please bear with me). The Losers are basically in the same situations they were in the book: each successful in their chosen profession, but subconsciously replaying the trauma of their childhood.
They get to Derry and have dinner at a Chinese restaurant, just like in the book, but now things start changing, and not for the better. In the book, the Losers weigh the decision whether to leave or stay, to make good on a childhood promise or to get the hell out of Dodge. It’s a very effective sequence in the book, selling just how frightened they are. That fear, in turn, translates to the reader. We mirror the character’s emotions, and that’s one of the reasons why the book is so damn terrifying even today.
In the book, the Losers decide to stay, partly because of the bonds of friendship forged so long ago, but also because this monster eats children. Their love for each other and their hatred and outrage over IT allow them to overcome their almost overwhelming fear. It’s great and noble and beautiful, but it doesn’t play that way in the movie. In the movie, Bev, who had been in the Deadlights when she was a girl, tells them that they’ve all been infected by IT, and that if they don’t destroy the monster, the infection will kill them. Instead of being about love of found family and a desire to protect others from the trauma they experienced, the Losers’ decision becomes about self-preservation, and it diminishes the characters.
After they learn this, Mike tells them that they must each search through Derry for a “token” that they can use in the ritual of CHUD. It has to be something personal that they can sacrifice at the right moment. The Losers then split up and go through town, remembering Pennywise and even encountering the monster again as adults. It’s a sequence that works better in the book. For one thing, it occurs before they meet at the Chinese restaurant, but even more than that, the book is about trauma and memory, about how forgetting can be healing, but also cancerous. The movie plays with this idea, but like pretty much everything else, it’s far too underdeveloped.
The sequence also misses something very important from the book: Pennywise is afraid of the Losers. Maybe not as much as they are of IT, but certainly enough to make IT cautious. As children, they were the only ones to actually hurt IT, threaten IT, and in doing so introduced doubt for the first time in ITs long existence. That’s why, in the book, Pennywise gives them a chance to leave. IT tries its best to scare them, and when that doesn’t work, IT uses Henry Bowers, their childhood bully, as a puppet to attack them indirectly.
That’s never made clear in the movie, and there’s frankly no reason for Pennywise not to off the adults when they’re separated and vulnerable. The characters are essentially protected by plot armor and nothing else.
To make matters worse, Henry Bowers has no real purpose in the movie. You could easily take his character out and the movie would stay the same. I don’t know if the screenwriter kept Bowers in because he was in the book, but he’s pointless and immediately forgettable. I should point out that this has nothing to do with the quality of the acting. Every actor in this movie gives it their all, and, frankly, the acting is what saves this movie. This is entirely a criticism of the writing.
Again, it comes down to nothing being truly developed. Bev runs away from her abusive husband, but nothing comes of that on camera except at the end when we see her and Ben together. We have no idea what happened to Tom (was he even named in the movie?), and the movie could have functioned fine without him. Bill’s wife Audra shows up for one scene and then that’s it. She has no purpose in the film other than to be Bill’s wife and to be part of the running joke that he can’t write a good ending (a criticism often leveled against King).
Bill finds his old bike Silver, and tells the pawn shop owner that it once “beat the devil,” but nothing comes from it. It’s not even his token. Eddie has a strange encounter in the basement of the old drug store he used as a child, but nothing comes of it. Nothing is revealed to us or him about his character. We discover that Ben is an architectural genius and we get to see the underground clubhouse he built (apparently all by himself. The kid wasn’t just a genius, he was a damn savant), but Ben has no purpose in this movie other than to moon over Bev and give pointed looks whenever she and Bill share a moment.
The two meatiest roles turn out to be Mike and Ritchie, and thank Maturin for that, because Mike was criminally, insultingly underused in the first movie. Like Ben in Chapter Two, Mike could have easily been cut from Chapter One and the movie would have essentially been the same. This was problematic on two levels: first, he’s a great character in the book, and deserved better, but also, he was the only person of color in the Losers club. His erasure, albeit partial, stings all the worse because it’s part of a larger tapestry of people of color being underrepresented or outright taken out of narratives.
Isaiah Mustafa plays Mike, and there’s a frantic, nervous energy to his performance that’s great. You get the feeling perhaps that he’s gone a little mad. He lives in the attic above the library like a lighthouse keeper, watching for some sign that IT has returned. He feels isolated, and the near manic joy he displays at the return of his friends is both sad and a little off-putting. Mike also fulfills the role he played in the book and should have played in Chapter One: the historian. He’s the one who puts it all together, who solves the puzzle pieces and discovers the true history of Derry. I can’t say if this is too little, too late, but I’m glad they gave the character some credit.
Ritchie has a much deeper role in this movie than the last. Bill Hader plays the character like a concert violinist and is excellent. The movie, depending on your point of view, makes him homosexual, or brings out what was just subtext in King’s book. I can’t say I picked up on Ritchie being gay in the four or five times I read the book (Eddie was more obviously coded, I think), but that doesn’t mean anything. I’m a pretty smart cookie, but I have my blind spots. Regardless of whether it was there all the time or something new, it adds an interesting dimension to his character. I just can’t decide whether they did enough with it or not enough. Ritchie never tells his friends, and the Loser he loved, Eddie, dies at the end, making him the only one of the surviving Losers to have a sad ending. Everyone else goes off to their lives of fortune and acclaim, some with new loves, and some with new leases on life, but Ritchie has nothing, and I don’t know what that means, if it means anything.
Again: two steps forward, one step back.
The climax of the movie is CGI-palooza, and it’s also the weakest part. Like the first movie, IT, Chapter Two works best in the quiet, character-driven moments. When it goes all CGI frightfest, it loses the intimate fear it establishes and becomes something laughable. This goes for both the CGI Spider-Pennywise and the Ritual of CHUD.
(also, as a side note, please, for the love of all that’s good and holy, stop using strobe effects in movies! That’s an express train to migraine city for me, and I had to look away and shield my eyes several times during the climax.)
In the book, the ritual is a psychic battle of wills. The way it’s first presented is that the monster and the human bite into each other’s tongues and tell each other jokes. The first to laugh loses their mind and their life. The actual ritual is far different. They “bite” into each other’s psyches and Pennywise does its very best to drive first Bill then Ritchie insane by essentially showing them the universe. This was the moment in the book when the terror reached literal and figurative cosmic proportions and becomes Lovecraftian.
I was very surprised when Mike first mentioned the ritual in the movie. I figured it was just too weird to work, and in a way, I was right. The ritual they perform is pretty weak sauce, and doesn’t actually work. What does work is belittling Pennywise. They have to make it “small” in order to deal with it, so they basically bully him until he’s drained of all power.
Intellectually, I get it. This is the same as Nancy turning her back on Freddy in the first Nightmare on Elm Street. “I take back the power I gave you.” It also fits the ritual in the book, if you kind of squint. As I said, intellectually, I get it, but I don’t think it plays well in the movie.
Two steps forward, one step back.
The movie is maddening because the parts that work, work very well, but it almost always sabotages itself. Chapter Two ends very differently than the book. In the book, the Losers go their separate ways (except for Bev and Ben, who end up together), and they start forgetting again. The forgetting is presented almost as something inevitable, like a balm for their souls. The trauma they experienced was just too much, and the only way they could function was to forget. That’s not what happens in the movie. In the movie, they remember, and it’s presented as something positive, that they have good memories along with bad, and throwing them all out would be a waste, possibly even harmful. The movie also ends with a letter from Stan Uris, presumably written just before he slit his wrists in the tub. In the letter, he says he knew he was too afraid, and that his fear would end up getting the others killed, so he “removed himself from the board.”
I don’t know what to think of these two changes. I don’t know if forgetting or remembering is healthier, and I don’t know how to feel about suicide being portrayed as a noble gesture. I suppose it can be, but that’s a narrative I find disturbing and potentially dangerous to put out there.
So, there it is, IT, Chapter Two. I can’t say that it’s a good movie, but it’s one that stuck with me long after I saw it, so that’s definitely a mark in its favor. I’m not really going to recommend or not recommend it, because I still can’t figure out how I feel about it. It’s best to make your own choice. If you do see it, drop me a line. I’m very curious to hear how others feel about it.
Grade: C+
