My opinion after watching it a second time is that I may have gotten into the "I've been waiting two years for this, I'm going to love it" and I kinda like it slightly less than the first in some ways. I feel like it has a stronger energy, but it's defeated by the fact that the adult storyline just...sucks. It sucked in the book, it sucked in the mini series, and it sucks in the remake, even if they tried to do something different. Turning it into a bunch of adventure-game style side quests, and the weird mix of cynical and yet shmaltzy ending is just a strange mix. Also they utterly ruined Bill and Debs's character. But they put Ritchie and Eddie's character in steroids. Mike has relevance, and Ben is just adorable.
But goddamn, it's a bad move to ever make suicide sound justified outside of a Right To Die situation. That was a bad move.
- I liked the slow approach and build to the adult group regaining their memories. It added significantly to the movie's runtime, but I appreciate some slow character development every once in a while
- On the other hand, it also meant that some things were frequently repeated -- seeing each of the kids getting jumped at by Pennywise one by one in succession made the scares lose their overall effectiveness over time, at least for this audience member.
- The supernatural scares were, interestingly for me, less scary than they were for the first movie. Instead, what creeped me out and stuck in my mind more in Chpt. 2 were the real world evils, such as
the homophobic attack in the opening scene, and the depictions of Bev's abusive relationships with both her dad and her husband.
- Some of the characters were given more depth and motivations/reasons for their behaviour later as adults.
- All the actors were really great and they had a good rapport between them. I loved that the adult cast looked like they could have conceivably been those kids. I liked their reunion scene in the early part of the movie; the interactions, banter, and good-natured ribbing between them really made it feel like their friendship was picking up where they'd left off as kids.
- The final confrontation with Pennywise left me a little let down.
They basically namecalled IT into submission I mean, I do get it -- Pennywise was more powerful the more fearful or unsuspecting its victims were, and by that time they were beyond fear, but I did kinda feel like it could have been shown a little differently. Like, they had a dialogue line that was something like "there are other ways to make IT small" and that felt clumsy to me, like it was said out loud more for the benefit of the audience than for the characters. Maybe it could have been delivered more organically by having, say, Richie, angry and devastated at Eddie's fatal wounds, start to hurl scathing mockeries at Pennywise which the others would pick up on and reinforce.
Anyway, I enjoyed the movie, although I feel the first one was better.
