It's been a while since I watched the first part of this adaptation of Stephen King's book, but with it coming off of Hulu pretty soon, I figured it was about time to finally check out how this concludes.
I was a little surprised by the runtime at first. The movie comes in at just under three hours. Most of the meat of the story occurs in the childhood portion and it seemed like that was covered in the first film. This one actually takes a more balanced approach, going back and forth between seeing the characters as children and as adults. The script actually manages to justify it pretty well, as they are remembering things about what happened that they had forgotten. It allows them to flashback, but not rehash scenes that were already seen in the first entry.
As was the case before, the movie is well cast. Everybody does a solid job, though Bill Hader as Richie was pretty inspired. His is probably the most memorable performance. He does a good job with the wisecracks, but the movie actually gives him more to work with, so you get some solid emotional scenes from him as well.
On a similar note, Skarsgard gets more to do as Pennywise. I was a little whelmed in his first outing, but he did a much better job here. His depiction here still fits with what we'd seen before, but it feels more like the Pennywise from both the book and the original mini-series. He taunts the characters a lot and the scene where he lures a girl under the bleachers is well done.
It's strange, as much as the movie hammers in the idea that the losers have to work as a group, a majority of the movie is spent showing the characters on their own individual fetch quests to retrieve personal items to be used in the film's version of the ritual of Chud and to reminisce (leading to the aforementioned flashbacks.) You'd think that it would make the movie feel padded or repetitive, but they actually managed to avoid that. The fact is even more surprising given how things play out later in the movie, but that's spoiler territory and while the movie is a couple of years old, I don't want to give everything away.
Sadly, no real mention of the turtle. We see a shot of a turtle statuette, but that's it. I guess it's not surprising that it was cut, but it would've been cool to see that element brought in this time around. The movie does provide a unique mechanism for us to see Pennywise's arrival on Earth, though.
Then again, given some of the special effects on display here, that's probably for the best. The CGI here was a little on the lackluster side. There's one scene where it's actually used to somewhat comedic effect, but there were quite a few misses. This movie did a better job in terms of horror, as it wasn't entirely reliant on jump scares, but the special effects did somewhat undercut the tension. The good news is that the giant spider is much more impressive. I'd guess that the final confrontation was the focus for the effects team and it did at least pay off on that front.
Overall, I enjoyed this quite a bit. It actually improved on things from the first one and gave elements from the book that didn't make it to the original mini-series to get adapted.
