Interdimensional Travesty

A review of  It Chapter Two (Spoilers Ahead) By Ram Charan

Storm drains are not incredibly welcoming –– especially in Derry, Maine. Every 27 years, the town is haunted by a mysterious shapeshifting creature, It, which often takes the form of a nightmarish clown named Pennywise. Such is the mythos of the novel and film series It; the second part of the terrifying two-part narrative was released in film on September 6th, 2019. 

The movie received widespread publicity, boasting multiple Hollywood A-listers such as Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, and James Mcavoy in its cast. This is because the film is a follow up to It, a widely praised, highly lucrative horror flick that benefited from a young cast’s incredible chemistry to deliver a very well rounded movie. It remains the most successful horror movie financially, not considering inflation, to date. 

Although I will forever be haunted by the image of young children running in the rain with yellow raincoats, It Chapter Two did little to build on the frightening legacy of its predecessor. The film appears to follow a general trend in filmmaking where well-crafted content is sacrificed for spectacle. The larger scale of the film is one of the reasons it falls short of the first film’s triumph. 

The novel and the film follows the lives of the “Loser’s Club,” a group of six friends around the age of twelve. One of the members’ brother, among many other kids in the town of Derry, goes missing, and the group of friends begin to investigate his disappearance. They each encounter a different version of the monster responsible for these disappearances and band together to try to kill It. They successfully banish It for the time being, but he returns 27 years later. The second film follows the Loser’s Club when they reunite to definitively rid the world of Pennywise.

In the first film, the way in which the children are so isolated their community is what made the film so desperately horrifying. The parents of some characters are never shown, and the ones that are shown are distant and oblivious about their children. There was a nagging feeling that the Loser’s Club would disappear without anyone noticing. After all, who would believe a killer clown is responsible for the deaths of children that people will not be likely to even remember. Part of Pennywise’s power is in making people forget his victims. This is symbolized by how missing posters in the movie are constantly placed over one another, or they float away in the wind. It is almost as if Pennywise controls the whole town, and the six members of the Loser’s Club are the only ones aware of his perverse diet. In a way, the stakes seemed to be much higher in the first film. 

It seems more probable that Pennywise will slaughter each of the members of the Loser’s Club individually, before they can overcome their greatest fears, when they are children rather than when they are adults. As adults, even though they are still fighting the same interdimensional and incredibly powerful being, something about the vulnerability of the Loser’s Club as tweenagers made the first film more appealing. The realness of how teenage outcasts could be ignored during such a serious and dangerous situation is what personally scared me the most.

So, was It Chapter Two a necessary addition to the already well-made It? The choice to include an adult portion of the story was not a creative decision on the screenwriter’s part; it was part of the original novel’s narrative. In the novel It, Stephen King switches back and forth between the perspectives of different characters at different ends of a 27 year time span. The 1,000 page story is incredibly difficult to capture in just one film, while retaining accuracy with respect to the source material. Although this is true, the decision to separate the films and the young and the old actors seems to leave a visible gap in the storytelling of the second film. 

While It Chapter Two does utilize flashbacks to the younger cast, they use a weird variation of CGI and face capture to de-age the cast. Unfortunately, the cast of It, being teenagers, have significantly grown and changed in appearance since the first film. The flashback sequences, featuring the de-aged actors, are incredibly uncomfortable to watch; they are indeed horrifying, but not for the right reasons. This is but one of the many examples where the use of computer generated graphics has gone completely wrong.

There was some creative merit in trying to separate the films from one another, especially in how it tried to provide more in-depth backstories to all of the characters. This, however, was a choice that made Chapter Two harder to watch. If content from both films had been layered over one another, parallels between the isolation of the first group of younger “losers” and the second group of older “losers” would have been easier to connect. For audiences that had not seen the first film, that same feeling of isolation clearly seen in the first film is never recaptured in the second.

By the time It Chapter Two has begun, each Loser is no longer in isolation. Richie, the “funny guy” of the group, is a famous standup comedian who is filming a special in the opening part of the film. Bill is a successful author who relies on his childhood trauma to deliver the world’s most horrifying books. Each has found a connected network of people: they are not isolated. By the time they get back together in Derry, they start to regain the fear and their sense of isolation, but it is simply not the same. While they eventually do split up, and encounter Pennywise individually once again, these sequences are a poor blend of tired out suspense and predictable jump scares. They often take too long and are sandwiched by flashbacks and long bouts of character exploration to fill in narrative gaps left by the first film. 

Despite how I feel about It Chapter Two, I loved the charming performance of Bill Hader, who played Richie, in the film and his hilarious exclamations at Pennywise’s unexplainable powers. Many other comical moments exist in the film apart from those provided by Hader’s character. One that especially comes to mind is when Henry Bowers, a psychopathic childhood bully of the Loser’s Club, tries to kill Eddie, another member of the Loser’s Club. Eddie is stabbed through the mouth, but somehow manages to stab Henry and yell insults at him before collapsing outside of the bathroom he is attacked in. Absurd moments like these are funny, but they are jarring tonal shifts from the dark nature of the film’s subject.

It Chapter Two is well-directed and acted, but it cannot overcome the narrative gap and the consequences of splitting the film into two separate parts. This decision, is what ruined the second film for me. There was no way that the dynamic chemistry of both casts could have been used to its full potential without the combination of multiple storylines. While splitting the story up was a good financial decision, it is, in effect, a poor creative/artistic decision. It Chapter Two is much too long, yet falls so short of the first film.