The 1990 miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's 1986 novel It casts a long shadow, one this new big-screen adaptation struggles to emerge from. It's also hard to deny that some of this film's creative thunder has been stolen by Stranger Things, which was heavily influenced by Stephen King.
Setting aside these two mitigating factors and judging the new It strictly on its own terms reveals an effectively creepy, well-constructed horror film with a sturdy emotional core.
The original story took place across two time periods, with young and old versions of every character. This film focuses only on the childhood part of the story, updating it to the late 1980s (from the novel's 1950s), which makes dramatic and commercial sense in today's franchise-centric film marketplace in how it sets up a sequel with a contemporary setting.
For now, though, we're focused on the pre-teen version of The Losers Club, seven small-town friends each enduring real-world horrors while also being tormented by an evil, supernatural entity that often takes the form of a sinister-looking clown named Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard).
Despite the obvious care and attention paid to the horror elements by director Andy Muschietti (Mama), the scenes in question can't help but start to feel like a succession of conceptual set pieces rather than natural extensions of the story. The coming-of-age elements carry a lot more weight, and the young cast is uniformly excellent, with Finn Wolfhard (from Stranger Things) standing out as the foul-mouthed Richie.
