Utopia Talk / Movie Talk / It (2017)

Palem Person.	Sat Sep 09 09:49:41 Went in expecting a lame remake of an old (albeit great) horror movie. Walked out completely satisfied. Highly entertaining. The best I can describe it is if they smashed the Goonies and It into one movie and used better technology and actors
The Children Member	Sun Nov 05 08:53:32 i was bored to the teeth watchin this bullshit. half of the scenes are the same from the old movie. it was like rewatchin an old flick 4 no fuckin reason. thankfully i have not gotta pay 2 wtahc this shit or i wuld be very pissed.
Cherub Cow Member	Sun Nov 05 19:41:15 I thought it was okay.. like.. nothing special, but not terrible either. Movie of the week sort of thing. :/ Some of the visuals were interesting, but they clearly went with CGI instead of practical effects in a lot of scenes. That CGI didn't look very good and took away from the horror tone. In the obvious case, the beginning sewer scene was more violent in this version, but because the lighting around the creature's face was so false (post work), the green-screened arm was so obvious, and the blood so CGI, it didn't have any emotion to it (for me at least). Kind of a waste, because it's super cool to see a modern pop movie that's willing to kill kids violently and on screen — they've had it too easy for too long ;p .. it's also nice to see a modern pop movie that's willing to show kids swearing (they could easily have toned that down via PG-13 for mass release). I have very little memory of the book, but I remember lots of swearing, which is fucking crucial (Fucking. Crucial.). The kids swearing and joking was a major plus for the movie, though I personally didn't laugh so much as smile occasionally like, "Fuck yeah. Swear and be free." I fucking swore in my childhood, so it's fucking annoying to see these shitty, watered-down kids movies that don't have any fucking swearing :p (I bet Harry Fucktard the Fuck Potter didn't swear once in that whole fucking franchise, fucking did he? The fuck.) Not sure that I like their casting choice for Bill in this movie (played by 14-year-old Jaeden Lieberher). Jonathan Brandis was a far more attractive teen. Lieberher is ugly, though, which matches better with the 1990 version's Richard Thomas, who played the older Bill and who was also ugly like Lieberher. So if they again cast someone ugly for the older Bill in the 2018 Chapter II (currently no casting confirmation beyond the creature), then the casting choice for young Bill in this movie makes sense. I do think that they did a good job with childhood nostalgia. Sometimes it was too overt (like a close-up on a classic bike frame as a lead-in to a scene), but that school-age running around and piecing together the world was familiar. I've only seen the first few episodes of "Stranger Things" (I thought it was pretty awful, but maybe I'll give it another chance), but it seems apparent that "It" was re-made to capitalize on the "Stranger Things" nostalgia vibe, which was not exactly a hidden motive given that "It" and "Stranger Things" share cast members. Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) was not bad at all and was even fun... but "fun" was also Skarsgård's issue. Pennywise in the 1990 version was meant to be creepy, but this one was just a joke from the start — a contribution of his intentional silliness, the CGI touchups of his scenes, and the lack of darkness in Skarsgård's eyes. I think this is part of a wider problem in horror movies where many horror makers no longer know how to make dark content. The usual cycle is to make fun of classic "serious" horror to overcome the scariness, then to consciously make a production which can't take itself seriously (which this was). The result for me was that this movie was not at all scary in the slightest fucking way. No scary mood moments, no conceptual darkness, and not even any effective jump scares (jump scares tend to be easy to fill, but the moments when the creature jumped out were tempered by how inconsequential the effects made everything seem). This is pretty impressive awfulness; I've watched a lot of bad horror movies, and even the ones that were terrible often achieved some malevolence of mood before the writing fell apart. But anyways, if you accept that this was a comedy movie and that the creature made fun of itself and was made to be made fun of immediately (the voice *is* quite silly and fun to mimic), then it's a fine movie. If you don't mind CGI visuals, then this movie could probably soar to absurd heights of positive opinions. Not really my thing though :/
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