I really need to see more horror movies, so I decided to kick off this “Spooktober” season with the 2017 version of It. It’s been on my watchlist for a very long time, and I don’t really know why, but I think it had something to do with it being a Stephen King adaptation. I remember being in middle school, and, being my dumb self, watching clips of the movie when I definitely shouldn’t have, and I was terrified then. So I definitely knew some stuff going in. It had mostly very positive reviews, so I set my expectations a little high and was unfortunately pretty disappointed.

The main reason for my disappointment was that it (pun unintended), to put it pretty blatantly, was simply just not scary (for the most part). Yeah, whenever Pennywise was on screen, it was pretty intense, which were the clips I watched as a middle schooler, but whenever he wasn’t on screen, I felt nothing. No tension, no sense of dread, absolutely nothing, and the main group of teenagers never felt like they were in any danger. I think the main reason for this is that the whole mystery-solving is tied to this one small group of kids. No one else in the town even seems to be somewhat affected by what’s going on. Whenever a new missing case comes up, we don’t see anyone’s reactions, so we, the audience, don’t even really know what to feel.

I also think that this film completely failed to capture the 80s aesthetic and atmosphere that would have definitely helped my opinion on the film. After seeing something like Stranger Things, which by chance has the same actor, Finn Wolfhard, in it, my standards are pretty high, but this didn’t even come close. The cinematography and atmosphere were just simply generic in my opinion, and failed to capture the horror of the story it was telling. I wanted to see more than just signs on movie theaters that said what movies were showing at the time and arcade machines.

Even for being one hundred and thirty-five minutes long, I think the movie was honestly a little too short. The pacing was pretty slow at times too, so saying this feels a bit weird, but I really think this needed to be somewhere closer to, believe it not, it’s sequel when it comes to the length. There simply wasn’t much time spent on character growth and development, making it hard for me to get attached to these characters and actually care if they survived or not (I know that sounds terrible, but it’s true). Obviously if this were real I would care, but it’s just a story. I think there could have also been more time devoted to the mystery solving. I really liked the little bit of stuff we got with Ben, “the new kid,” where he was doing some of the investigating, but there was hardly any of that at all. This led to them solving the mystery in a rather anticlimactic and underdeserved fashion.

Speaking of anticlimactic, the whole third act was definitely just that. There were definitely some interesting revelations that the kids found, but for the most part, it felt very rushed. Nothing felt earned, and the ending to the climax was by far the most underwhelming part of it all. It tried to pay off several things in the story, but all of them felt a bit sudden and, I know I’ve used this word already, undeserved. There was also a bit of an extreme use of CGI here that I didn’t think looked all that great, whereas the rest of the film looked pretty good.

I know I’ve had a lot of negative things to say, but there were absolutely positive things about the movie. First off, just to note, I wasn’t ever really bored by the movie. Yeah, the pacing did drag a bit at times, but I never really tuned out of the film if you know what I mean. Like I said, it should have been even longer. Now, I have two main positives overall, which I know you’re probably thinking, “If you only really have two main positives and several negatives, why did you give this film just a mediocre score and not lower?” Well, the two main positives I do have heavily kept me into the movie and where honestly two things that I thought were done really, really well.

Just to get the obvious one out of the way, Bill Skarsgård is absolutely fantastic as Pennywise. Every time he was on screen, I felt creeped out and tense, and I’m not even scared of clowns. He was just plain weird and unpredictable in a sense that made it hard to figure him out, but in a good way. Yeah, the movie was really only intense whenever he was on screen, but whenever he was, it was extremely intense. Bill Skarsgård returning for the upcoming show, IT: Welcome to Derry, even has me interested to check it out just because of his performance in this movie, even though I wasn’t all that positive on the film overall. I’m also contemplating watching It Chapter Two, even thought that film actually has pretty mixed reviews.

The other big positive I have is the dynamic between the group of teenagers. Like I said, I don’t think there was enough character development at all with any of them, but I do think their relationship and comradery between one another was very believable and well done. The actors that played them also did a very good job, so I think the casting crew did a good job picking good people for them. Their dynamic just gave off that “coming-of-age” type of storytelling that I know lots of people can relate to (obviously), and that I’ve heard Stephen King does a really good job with whenever he does it.

While I was pretty disappointed with It overall, I think that it mainly just comes down to missed potential, because there were definitely things that I found really intriguing and actually has me interested in seeing other projects, like the sequel and the upcoming HBO show.