by Megan Bailey, Staff Writer

The odds are that you’ve read or seen some iteration of It. There’s Stephen King’s original door stopper of a novel, the 1990 miniseries, and then the two-part movie series in 2017 and 2019. If you’ve been living in a sewer grate, It follows a group of friends, termed “the Losers,” in Derry, Maine, as they fight off against a cosmic horror as children and then, about thirty years later, as adults.

Written by Lawrence D. Cohen and Tommy Lee Wallace, It (1990) aired as a two-part miniseries in November of that year. Now available on HBOMax as a 3-hour movie, it’s not presented in its original split format. The series was praised for Tim Curry’s portrayal of Pennywise and the child actors’ performances, while the second half was not as well-received. The childhood scenes take place in 1960, and the adult storyline is in 1990. The Losers were played as children and adults, respectively, by Jonathan Brandis and Richard Thomas (Bill), Emily Perkins and Annette O'Toole (Bev), Marlon Taylor and Tim Reid (Mike), Brandon Crane and John Ritter (Ben), Seth Green and Harry Anderson (Richie), Adam Faraizl and Dennis Christopher (Eddie), and Ben Heller and Richard Masur (Stan).

On the whole, I think it’s a pretty effective adaptation, though there are some plot issues that also appear in the modern movies. For instance, the 1990 version portrays each of the Losers (minus Stan) getting into Derry, remembering seeing Pennywise as a child, and then a scary interaction with It in the present. Once they’ve all come into town and had their moment, they meet for dinner. The individual Pennywise encounters stop the plot dead for a solid twenty minutes. But, as I’ll cover later, It Chapter Two does the same thing.

However, I think the miniseries has really great story framing. It begins in the modern day, with Pennywise appearing to a young girl, and afterward, Mike visits the crime scene. He sees a MISSING poster for Bill’s younger brother, which prompts him to call everyone back to Derry. So within the first ten minutes, we’ve seen Pennywise in his clown form, he’s taken a child, and we understand that Mike’s encountered It before. It’s an effective set-up for the mix of flashbacks and modern sequences, whereas the modern films are split into sections.

I also think the miniseries does a better job at establishing character without bogging down the storytelling. Bill, Stan, and Ben are pretty well-established in both the 1990 and newer versions, but there’s more to them in the miniseries, as with Bev, Richie, and Eddie. Mike is perhaps the only character to get more meaningful development in the newer films, but it’s changed from the source material. Younger Mike is introduced to the Losers much earlier in It (2017), and we find out that his parents died in a house fire, so he’s living and working on his grandfather’s farm.

In the miniseries, with Stan dead and Mike hospitalized, the rest of the Losers go into the sewer to defeat It a second time. Eddie plans to stun it using his inhaler, like he did when he was a kid, but he’s wounded and ends up dying in the sewers. Beverly is able to hit It with silver, also like she did when they were younger, and the remaining Losers follow the injured spider form and rip out Its heart to kill It. This death for It is simplified from the book, but I think the changes work as a pretty satisfying conclusion.

Because it was intended for television, the miniseries rides a fine line between going for the goriness and scariness and keeping it clean enough for television censors. There’s blood and gore, but it’s not nearly as gross as the modern films. But I don’t necessarily think that’s bad. The effects are dated, but the scares still work in that they make bright, mundane things spooky. If you’d like to know more about the production of the miniseries, check out Pennywise: The Story of It, which Stacey Osbeck reviewed here on MovieJawn.

For comparison, It Chapter One was released in 2017, followed by Chapter Two in 2019. The first film was written by Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman, and the second was written exclusively by Dauberman. Andy Muschietti directed both films. Pennywise, played by Bill Skarsgård, is styled in a more outright scary way, edgier and way less colorful. The Losers are played as children and adults, respectively, by Jaeden Martell and James McAvoy (Bill), Sophia Lillis and Jessica Chastain (Bev), Chosen Jacobs and Isaiah Mustafa (Mike), Jeremy Ray Taylor and Jay Ryan (Ben), Finn Wolfhard and Bill Hader (Richie), Jack Dylan Grazer and James Ransone (Eddie), and Wyatt Oleff and Andy Bean (Stan).

The timeline is moved, so that the Losers encounter Pennywise first as children in 1988, and then their modern-day encounters are in 2016. Pushing these up makes the movies more current and ties into the ‘80s nostalgia heyday we’ve been in since Stranger Things kicked off. It’s a strong choice, but there’s definitely a missed opportunity in not including the clown sightings that happened in real life in 2016.

Before we get into the meat of the modern films, allow me to be a bit petty. When I first saw It: Chapter Two, I had a terrible theater experience. Early on in the film, there’s a gay bashing. As the scene with Adrian (Xavier Dolan) and Don (Taylor Frey) progressed, the two characters kiss, and a man sitting beside me audibly groaned. And then I had to watch the couple be brutally attacked knowing that at least one man in the audience was uncomfortable with queer people. The men are viciously beaten, and Adrian is thrown over the bridge to drown. But Pennywise gets to him first, eating his heart out while Don watches.

I want to point out that the actors playing that queer couple are openly queer in real life. And for all that there’s been a discussion about whether we need queer characters to be played by out queer actors, it seems silly to purposefully cast queer men to be hate-crimed but to have a straight actor (Bill Hader) play the canonically queer member of the Losers. The decision to have an inclusive hate crime while also confirming Richie’s queerness and feelings for Eddie (which can be read as subtext in the book and, with some added effort, the miniseries) is just deeply strange. There’s obviously a lot of nuance to the representation conversation, but this movie is about as subtle as a brick.

Chapter Two is seemingly uninterested in wrestling with so much of what’s in the text. The movie’s just checking off items on a list rather than interrogating them or giving them any sort of weight. Richie’s queerness is only lightly touched on and then left unresolved, even when the other characters have seemingly happy endings. Chapter Two shows a flashback of Richie showing interest in a boy he plays with at the arcade, but then Henry Bowers shows up and calls him a slur. Right after reliving that encounter, Pennywise tells Richie that he knows his secret. Beyond the shot of Richie carving “R + E” into the bridge at the end of the film, that’s all we get. Richie is queer, but there’s no reason for him to talk about it, I guess.

Similarly, Bev’s abusive relationships aren’t discussed in any way. They’re only resolved in that she ends up with Ben, who isn’t an asshole. The miniseries gives this more weight, when she talks to Ben about the abuse she’s suffered from her dad and her partner at the time. In this, she leaves her abusive husband, takes off the ring, and never says anything about it. She has bruises on her arms from her husband, but nobody else says anything either. She finds a better man, but there’s no catharsis.

What I find so deeply strange about It: Chapter Two is that it doesn’t deliver on the set-up from Chapter One. Because of that, it has to give us new flashbacks (with some offputting de-aging effects on the teenage cast) to develop the elements it plays up instead. And even those don’t always work. There are added flashbacks for everyone, as each adult goes to find their token to defeat Pennywise. Each Loser relives a memory with It and then encounters It again in the modern day. While they’ve made these encounters a part of the story, they still stop the story dead for a while in order to give us the new scenes and give weight to the tokens. What’s odd is that if they’d adequately planned for the sequel, those flashback sequences could have been in the first movie.

Moving on to the end of Chapter Two, there are several scenes that discuss Bill’s inability to write good endings, including one where Stephen King makes a cameo to tell Bill that his book endings all suck. And with all of that energy, they go with such a deeply unsatisfying final battle that it’s almost comical. It wants to tell us that villains can be beaten by talking down to them, but it’s just a goofy battle with Pennywise; the Losers follow him around, calling him a “sloppy bitch” and “just a clown,” as he gets smaller and smaller. And then, like the miniseries, they rip his heart out and crush it. There’s just something about the insult-a-cosmic-horror-to-death plan that doesn’t work for a movie that harps so much about unsatisfying endings.

One aspect of the modern films that is done exceptionally well is Stan. His storyline is tightened up, and we see quite a bit about his Jewishness in the films, including his bar mitzvah. But what stands out the most is his suicide note in Chapter Two. At the end, once Pennywise is defeated, his note has been mailed around to the Losers. We see Stan, writing the note, and he looks directly into the camera as if he’s talking to us. He explains that he took himself off the board because he knew he was too scared to go back to Derry, and he asks them if it worked. It’s such a powerful moment, and a welcome addition to the sequel.

Not to stir the pot too much here, but I think the problems in the modern It movies, especially Chapter Two, are emblematic of the issues with modern filmmaking. It’s a remake of a classic, as so many projects are these days. While not inherently a bad thing, we are in a big era of remakes, sequels, and prequels. There’s too much focus on backstory. There’s a much more involved explanation for how It came to Earth, as well as mentions of his time as a clown in Derry before the Losers met him in 1988. Henry Bowers also has a violent dad, because we need to know why he’s such a bully. There’s too much explanation, even when it’s much scarier to not know the answer. And there are too many drawn-out sequences that fill out the runtime without adding to the story. All of this leads to the modern It films being way too long, clocking in around five hours total. And, just as a personal opinion, I think movies are much too long these days. While there are films that can and should be over two hours, there’s no reason for It Chapter Two to be almost three hours long.

Ultimately, I think what disappoints me so much about the It franchise is that there was such potential for it to be great. The cast is stellar, the movie looks great, but the script is just a let down. Everything falls apart rather than coming together. And to top it (haha) all off, there’s talk of a prequel series on HBO, following Pennywise in the 1960s and depicting even more of his origin story. I hope that it’s good for the people who want to see that, but I definitely don’t.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated Cary Fukunaga directed IT: Chapter One and Two