Back in 1986, when Stephen King first wrote It, his seminal 1,138-page horror epic about a clown-demon terrorising a small New England town, he probably wasn't thinking about search engine optimisation. Pity, then, the poor studio marketers hoping to gain Google ranking traction on a widely used third person singular pronoun. But, as it turns out, the Warner Bros. marketing team needn’t have worried: as that record-breaking trailer attests, Pennywise The Dancing Clown holds a deep-seated cultural cachet, and this latest adaptation from Mama director Andy Muschietti meets that huge expectation like a perma-grinning demon meeting an unsuspecting victim.
It ranks among the better Stephen King adaptations — no small praise indeed.
This is emphatically not the Tim Curry-starring made-for-TV adaptation from 1990. There are deferential little nods here and there — a likeness of Curry’s costume can be glimpsed in one scene, and the iconic opening sequence, with the paper boat of doom, seems nearly identical — but Muschietti’s version feels distinct, discarding the back-and-forth timelines for a straightforwardly linear story (the grown-up portion of the story reserved for a potential sequel), wisely dispensing with the book’s bizarre pre-teen orgy, and shifting things along by 30 years or so, from the original ’50s setting to the more Amblin-esque ’80s.
The result: a coming-of-age yarn not unlike a horror-inflected jumble of The Goonies and E.T. (plus, inevitably, Stand By Me — another King adaptation). Which means the kids are important, and Muschietti is patient enough to devote precious screentime establishing each member of the Losers’ Club and their respective dysfunctional lives. There’s a lot of exposition to get through, but each of the seven losers gets their due, and the result is a truly well-rounded ensemble, as awkward and romantic as they are foul-mouthed and funny. Credit must go to the young cast, among whom there is no single weak link; it’s as authentic a portrayal of children staring down the barrel of adolescence as you’re ever likely to see.