Director: Andy Muschietti
Writers: Stephen King, Gary Dauberman
Stars: Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, Bill Hader
Run Time: 2 Hours, 49 Minutes
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/2H7ZE6z
Synopsis
We start in 1989, after the events of the first film, and the girl character, Beverly, explains that she’d seen the future.
27 Years later…
A gay couple are having fun at the carnival, and some local jerks start harassing them, which goes badly for the couple. They’re badly beaten, and then they throw one of them off a bridge. The guy who is in better condition runs downriver after him, and sees Pennywise the clown eat the guy’s heart out.
Mike Hanlon from the first film hears the police call on the radio, and he immediately suspects Pennywise was involved. Bill Denbrough is a writer on a major film, but everyone complains that he can’t write good endings. Mike calls him and says he needs to come home to Derry. Eddie gets a similar call, as do Rich, Ben, Stanley, and Beverly. They’re all shaken up by his call, even before he explains why he’s calling. Rather than deal with it, Stanley kills himself.
Beverly is in an abusive relationship, so she’s actually probably better off fighting real demons anyway. Henry the bully has been institutionalized, and he freaks out one day when he sees just a single red balloon float by.
Meanwhile, in Derry, members of “The Losers Club” start arriving back in town, 28 minutes into the film. It turns out, if you leave town, the memories of what happened start to fade, so only Mike, who never left town, actually knows what happened. Weird stuff happens with fortune cookies. Meanwhile, Pennywise eats a little girl and Henry escapes from the institution.
Mike explains how the Native Americans explained that the “demon” came from outer space or something two hundred years ago. Beverly has been getting visions of death because she was the only one to see the “deadlights” all those years ago. It takes 55 minutes to get to the point where all six characters decide they really do need to do something. But first, they find out that they need to remember what happened to them, and this involves finding some kind of artifact from the past, one for each of them.
About this time I started browsing Reddit on my phone.
Something happens in Beverly’s old home that involves some of the absolute worst CGI I’ve ever seen in a big-budget movie or even most low-budget films. There’s a scene with a sewer and a scene with a classroom.
Somewhere around the 90-minute point, Kevin sighed and said, “My goodness this is a long movie.”
Then there’s a scene in the basement of a pharmacy. Henry turns up in Eddie’s bathroom. Bill goes to the carnival, and he experiences the (not so) fun-house hall-of-mirrors trope. Henry then pops up in Mike’s library.
They have to do the ritual to kill Pennywise in the old house. Why they didn’t do this an hour ago, I don’t know, but they still have yet another hour to go. Of course, they immediately get split up. There’s a spider scene homage that “The Thing” did better forty years ago. This is so obvious that they literally quote the Thing film.
Finally, they go down into the well or sewer under the house. Creepy stuff happens again. They drop their artifacts into the fire. The fire goes out and then three lights come down from the sky. The light goes into the magic jar, but it doesn’t stay there, turning into a giant balloon. It turns out the ritual was a scam that even Mike knew was never going to work.
Lots of running and screaming happens among more bad CGI and transitions between all those characters who are all split up now. Finally, they figure out a way to bring Pennywise down to size. Then there’s like three or four wrap-ups and endings, any of which could have been the end.
Commentary
The acting here is really good, and the adult versions of the characters are really well-cast actors that look a lot like the younger generation. On the other hand, I generally don’t notice this sort of thing much, but the CGI is really atrocious. From the creatures to the de-aged versions of the young “Losers,” this looks like it was done in a real rush.
It proceeds at a glacial pace, drawing every single scene out and then adding more scenes. If they had wanted to make this a trilogy, they could have. Instead they just made it long. Obviously, the book was written in two major parts, the past and the present, but there’s so much here that it really could have been filmed all at once and then broken up into a trilogy. Or edited down into two reasonably-long movies.
Oh, and did anyone ever do anything about the gay-bashing incident in the first scene? It was brutal, and the perpetrators all looked like real characters, but we never heard from any of those people again, almost as if the scene was shot for a different film.
This is a mess. A really really realllllllly long mess.