We All Float Down Here
Every 27 years, it wakes up. The formless being known only as IT rises every 27 years to feed off of any victims it can find. In 1990, the original film adaptation of Stephen King’s IT released in theaters. Now the creature that nobody can survive an encounter with has returned, and the official film remake has arrived.
The original novel follows a group of children who discover a clown in the sewers of Derry, Maine. The sinister clown introduces himself as Pennywise and always attempts to charm children to follow him, before killing them and eating their remains. After the main character, Bill Denbrough, loses his brother to Pennywise, he and his friends swear to destroy him forever. They figure that the monster could be a vampire, so take silver earrings and melt them into small projectiles, then use a slingshot to launch them at Pennywise once they find him. They did not have guns or any other weapons to work with, but what few resources they did have had worked. They thought he was dead, but they decided that if he was to return, they would all come back to defeat him once and for all. One friend vows to stay in Derry to see if he ever comes back.
The story then fasts forward years into the future, and the friend that stayed back starts to hallucinate and becomes paranoid. He calls each person in the group that had killed Pennywise before, and all but one of them return. After each member of the Derry group starts to have hallucinations, as Pennywise starts to get into their minds, they decide to return to the sewers. They take a slingshot and find the silver projectiles that they had used 27 years before. The silver did not work, Pennywise only got angrier. He then revealed his true form, a giant spider. IT was a giant, demonic spider. His heart was ripped out, and he was defeated at last.
The 1990 film was created with extreme detail to the book, doing the best to put in every aspect of the novel within the time slot. Rotten Tomatoes, a popular film review program, rated the original film a surprising 62%, generally low based on the popularity of the book and the $44M budget. Another film rating company, IMDb, gave a score of only 6.9/10. Some say that the effects were poor and stiff, the flashbacks were repetitious, and the cast choices were odd. The three-hour adaptation of the 1000 page book received very mediocre and mixed reviews, but the remake is said to be much better.
The 2017 version of I
T was given a much better 86% by Rotten Tomatoes, and IMDb has given it an 8.1/10. Many praise it for being much shorter than the original film, but still getting to the main points. The remake was produced to renew the experience, especially since digital effects have improved so much over the years. The possibilities for a new movie were great, and the opportunity was taken. Since the effects have improved in the 27-year gap, and some say that it is a very stylish and scary horror film that goes along with older films rather than modern ones. On the contrary, many complain about the scary parts were predictable and too similar to the original adaptation. In the end, the second It film is much better than the original and viewing it is suggested. It premiered in theaters on Friday, September 8, 2017.