IT (15, 135 mins)
Director: Andres Muschietti
Stars: Bill Skarsgård, Jaeden Lieberher, Finn Wolfhard
Happy Days, The Wonder Years, Back To The Future, Dirty Dancing and Stand By Me all repackaged the rock and roll era for a generation that was too young to have lived through it.
This decade, they’ve been doing the exact same thing to the 1980s. Films like Super 8, Midnight Special and Drive have introduced a new generation to the delights of the synth soundtrack and (fake) lens flare.
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Meanwhile, Netflix hit Stranger Things has delivered its 1980s references with a knowing wink.
So it seems the perfect time to bring Stephen King’s 1986 clown horror novel IT to the big screen. The action begins in 1989 (the book, tellingly, began in the 1950s) in the town of Derry, Maine, as Bill (Midnight Special’s Jaeden Lieberher), persuades his little brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) to sail a paper boat in a gutter in the middle of a violent storm.
Director Andy Muschietti lingers on the cute child as he follows the boat to a drain, where he’s met by a creature calling himself Pennywise The Dancing Clown (Bill Skarsgard), who entices the boy to edge closer and closer to his doom.
It’s a terrifying scene and the film’s best. But after revealing the monster in the opening scene, it was perhaps inevitable that his impact would begin to wane.
Still, the shocks are delivered with style by the Mama director. It was the long stretches in between that tested my patience.
Muschietti serves up yet another tale of a group of misfit BMX kids riding around a small town America trying to solve a mystery. This may have felt fresh when King wrote the novel but it feels horribly familiar this far into a 1980s rival.
As the gang’s weak banter becomes increasingly repetitive (a motormouthed kid played by Stranger Things’s Finn Wolfhard is especially tiresome), Muschietti begins to slap on ever thicker layers of nostalgia with references to Molly Ringwald, New Kids On The Block, the Slinky, and Nightmare On Elm Street.
It’s always fun to look back on your childhood, but I’d rather be looking forward to a sequel.