Talked about this movie over dinner last week with some friends after seeing it with Friend while our car was being serviced. I mentioned that I had spoken to a friend who’s gay about what he thought about the scene at the beginning of the movie that has garnered some criticism for its callous, unresolved milking of real life “gay-bashing” for shock-effect. I said at dinner that the kids-turned-adults had successfully beaten It but no one in the film could beat homophobia for some reason. But this friend had actually liked the symmetry of the beginning and the new relationship between Richie and Eddie created for the film.
The day I went to see the movie I talked to the person who works in the front office of my building and she said it was 1) too long (at nearly 3 hrs) and 2) the “fight” at the end went on forever. When I mentioned that to Friend, he laughed and said, “I heard that the Losers essentially bully It into submission at the end. It became a running joke to lean into each other in the first two hours of episodic scares to ask, “How is this going to result in them bullying each other?” Even during the actual fight, when It turns into a giant lobster or whatever, it seemed like the Losers had a fairly well thought out, well-foreshadowed plan to entrap him in a small-ass crawlspace before bashing him in the head or something. Everyone keeps saying “It must abide by nature regarding whichever form It takes,” so it seems like it ought to eventually come up. When finally they shout down the giant monster in a cave within a cave within a house by rudley calling him a “clown,” it just feels a little… mean? uncreative?
Ultimately, Friend seems like he’s got it right when he said that It’s repeated failure to eliminate the Losers when they return to Derry makes It seem progressively more and more incompetent. It’s the Wiley E. Coyote problem AKA The Dalek Problem: a menacing character loses his power to scare gradually over time if he repeatedly fails to obtain his objective, which is necessary for their rivalry to continue. Probably the best scene is under the bleachers at the football game. It’s one of the moments that hearkens back to the creepy mouthiness of It in the first film, the chilling way It manipulates its prey, takes advantage of their kindness, and doesn’t fail in its objective.
Sequels don’t have to be facsimiles of the original, especially not ones that are explicitly 27 years in the future. So much of what made the first film work so well was that its iconic portrayal of the 80s in Derry resonated so well with movie goers hot on the trailer of Stranger Things Season One and Super Eight and all the rest of those kid-powered nostalgic homages in recent memory. Part Two isn’t nostalgic about anything, and that’s okay, but at the same time, it felt a little out of place, lacking pop culture references from the present and relying pretty heavily on flashbacks from childhood and inside jokes from the Losers glory days.
The scares lacked a meaningful referent, which we’ve talked about as a necessary component of any good horror film, which might not be so much a fault of the film as the source material. Colleague from work said that Eddie’s thing in the book was a fear of eyes (???), which seems like more a gross-out plot point than anything meaningful to child development. I can’t help but think that Cary Fukunaga’s brief stint as a collaborator and director of the first film, and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s involvement–however minimal–contributed to the diminishing quality of the sequel.
All in all, It 2 is a bit of a mess–and a long mess at that. Alex McLevy over at the AV Club suggests that the film works better as comedy than horror, which I think was actually one of the strengths of the first one in the series as well. I remember sitting in the audience on opening night and listening to people laugh out loud because the scene was so scary and the way that the child actors stood in as surrogates for the audience rode a nice balance between comedy and horror. I think adults don’t get as much leeway when it comes to snappy one-liners in horror films, especially if they’re known for their comic chops, so a lot of the jokes that would’ve been hilarious to watch a 12-year-old no-name pull fall flat when said by the likes of Bill Hader.
I’m supposed to mention that the movie appears to have upped the racism to a ten in a way that the book had more nuance, so I’m just going to leave that flaming bag of dogshit on your porch to crush underfoot when you are good and ready.
It’s an important lesson in life to learn that you can never recover what you’ve lost and the past always remains in the past, so go see this movie if only to feel that brief tinge of pain and regret at the fact that you aren’t seeing the original… reboot… we loved so much.
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