The follow up to one of 2017’s best movies, IT came out last weekend. And to make a long story short, I think anyone excited for this movie will come out of the theater disappointed. I would describe this as a bad movie with great character moments. And character moments are why the first movie was so good, but it did not have to rely on them as the only good aspect, like this movie did.

I do not like to bash movies for the sake of bashing movies because it is easy to tell that the people behind this movie did try hard and I am glad that I saw this movie. If you are a fan of the first remake, then you should absolutely see this.

But something critical that the first one did right, and what ultimately made it good, was the fact they didn’t copy and paste the book pages to the movie screen; they made it their own thing. What most book fans don’t accept (especially comic book readers), is that a movie adaptation is good because how well it copies what happened in the source material as well as adding scenes. Directors have to add to it, take away from it, and make it their own.

With that being said, it is vital that you respect the material and don’t strain too far from the story and the characters, but directors have to add their own voice and tone to it. Andy Mushietti did that with the first movie; he only used about one third of the source material and what he took he perfected and built upon it.

And that was okay, I was satisfied and I was honestly surprised when they announced a second movie. I immediately thought they would do a trilogy, because if you are trying to finish the story for book’s sake you can’t fit it into one movie, and unfortunately they tried to do that. They tried to fit the rest of the story into one movie, even though the whole reason the first one worked so well was because they did not do that.

While it is disappointing, it is not all bad if 30-40 minutes were trimmed off of the 2 hour and 40 minute run time and changed a few scenes. Had it been trimmed, this movie could have easily lived up to the first one. We didn’t need the rest of the story, we just needed to see the losers club finish out their own story line.

The best thing about this movie was the casting of the grown up versions of all the characters. All of the actors gave their best and managed to feel like a genuine group of friends reuniting. Bill Hader easily stole every scene he was apart of.

In a weird way, this was one of the funniest movies I have seen in a long time and I don’t say that sarcastically. It has genuinely funny humor that does not feel out of place.

Pennywise was a major disappointment of the movie. While he is still great, he did not have the same type of horror he had in the first movie. This movie was purely jump scares and nothing else, and by the time you get to the last 40 minutes I felt unphased by them. They did nothing new with the character, and every time he showed up it was cheap and brief.

The first movie does this thing where it builds up the intensity of the scene by letting pennywise direct the scene. The way he plays the audience and has these long drawn out moments of dialogue managed to make me feel more uneasy by the second. This movie failed in the sense that it did not do that.

Pennywise is supposed to have a different dynamic with the adults than he does with the kids, a dynamic producers do not try at all. Instead, it’s just jump scare after jump scare. I’ll admit, some of the jump scares are really smart and work well, but they are just poor substitutes for the lack of creativity.

There are a couple really great moments in the movie, moments that made me mad because they are so good, it made me realize what could have been. This movie has some scenes that are better than the first movie, but they either don’t keep the pace of it or ruin it by unnecessarily dragging it on for so long.

The best part of the whole movie is in the trailer, I won’t spoil what it is, but it would have been great if they did not show it in the trailer. The scene would have been much better if it was not hinted at in the first place.

I have a feeling that this will be a movie that grows on me over time, but as of now I am really disappointed in it. Not just because it’s not so good of a movie, but the fact that it teases us with something that could have been one of the best horror movies of all time.