Horrible Thoughts Reviews: It Chapter Two
I have very mixed feelings on the works of Stephen King. On the one hand, he writes some fantastic horror set pieces and can have a real eye for imagery, on the other hand he too regularly falls back on the same repetitive tropes and his prose style really isn't to my tastes. Adaptations of his books are almost always one of two extremes: either they're timeless masterpieces, like The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption, or Misery, or they're just awful, like Secret Window, Thinner or Maximum Overdrive. With that in mind, I was pleasantly surprised by 2017's version of It. It managed to stay true to the spirit of the book, the otherworldly, nightmarish quality and the looming existential horror, and draw out the deeper themes, pushing the metaphors for cycles of abuse to the forefront without losing the crowd-pleasing scares. The young cast was extraordinary, the creature designs were suitably disturbing, and the choice to skip over some of King's more...controversial story elements was a welcome one. All in all it was one of the best big budget horror films of the year. So does the hotly anticipated sequel match it?
The short answer is no, unfortunately. Although It: Chapter Two isn't a bad film by any means, it's messier and more self-indulgent and relies too heavily on showy CGI effects and goofy humour to pack the same punch as it's predecessor. The fault isn't entirely with the film makers, though. I always thought that the bits of the book that concerned the adults were muddier and less focused than the scenes with the characters as children, as they become increasingly jumbled with nonsense about Native American rituals with silly names and memory loss shenanigans. It's a much more faithful adaptation than the first half (if I'm remembering correctly, it's been a good long while since I read the book). The conceit that the Losers Club have all forgotten the events of the first film,thanks to the aforementioned memory loss shenanigans, means its even structured more like the book, flickering between the “present day” and memories of childhood. This in itself isn't a bad thing, it's nice to see the child actors again (honestly they're better than some of the adults) but it slows the pace at times and makes some sequences feel repetitive, and given the first half of the film follows the Losers trying to remember everything that happened in preparation for the daftly named Ritual of Chud, there's a plenty to give one a feeling of deja vu.
The scares are less impactful, but that's as much to do with the larger scale of the whole film than anything else. Where the first film was a relatively small intimate tale of children trapped in very personal nightmares that they can't hope to understand, the second is a quest to beat a vast cosmic horror with exposition, rationalisation and the power of friendship, and that's not something conducive to creating effective creeps. The unknown is always more frightening, so the more the entity is explained, the less it can scare us. Plus, though this may just be a personal thing, but giant monstrosities just aren't scary to me, at least not on film, so lengthy sequences of It as an enormous spider-clown thing just didn't really feel menacing in the same way as when It pretends to constrain itself within a human-ish form.
Which brings us nicely onto the many monstrous forms of It. Now, although the CGI is a little too heavy for my tastes, particularly in the latter half of the film, there are still some pretty cool creature designs and some satisfying physical effects on display. There's a few sequences with a zombie-like version of one of the bullies from the first film, along with a return of the creepy leper makeup (albeit in a very silly sequence). We see some new forms such as a freakish but weirdly comical witch-like old woman, and an eerily splintered animated statue, but most of the time, as with the first film, we see It in the form of Pennywise the clown (Bill Skarsgard, still the best adult performance in both films). Skarsgard is still excellent, flitting between fun and menace in ways that continue to surprise, and the effects are at their best when they accent his performance. Some of the most interesting moments come when the entity shifts between the Pennywise form and a more monstrous one, I really enjoyed the recurring motif of adding far too many hands and teeth. I also particularly enjoyed the way that the colour palette would start to subtly shift as soon It's influence started to affect a character, a simple effect that really added a hallucinatory feeling to certain sequences. The spider-Pennywise creature that we see for most of the climax is perhaps a little too silly, and the depiction of the “deadlights” as orbs of light is perhaps a little too literal, but I appreciate how difficult it must be to represent a creature that is supposed to be incomprehensible to the human mind in a visual medium.
Over all, there's a lot to enjoy but the film feels bloated and repetitive and the adult cast isn't able to ground the film in the same way as the younger cast could. Expect more of an off-kilter action-horror vibe as opposed to the more disturbing and unsettling shocks or overt theme-weaving of the first film.
