#also i loved that it was a pisstake of pointless. i hate pointless

[heffrondriving]

people really just find anything to be pissed about these days huh........because sincerely, what the actual fuck are y'all going on about??? all this moral uproar and vitriol for a silly old-ass boyband song????? please stop it forever <3

[rantshemlock]

It: Chapter 2

It: Chapter 2 is an almost three hour movie in which just about nothing of value happens

this review contains implied spoilers for the movie! if that bothers you, don’t read ahead.

It (2017) had some incredible setpieces with brilliant monster designs and fantastic practical effects, bolstered by a couple of excellent performances from the show-stealing Finn Wolfhard and Jack Dylan Grazer, along with an outstanding performance by Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise. this, and the simplicity of the plot, make up for the fact that the character writing was often shallow and the dialogue laden with exposition.

It: Chapter 2 has almost all of those qualities, but also one major flaw: it's a bad movie.

there’s a lot to unpack when it comes to why exactly It 2 is such an extreme drop in quality to the first movie; the biggest is the story, which is a mish-mash of new footage of the child actors and the characters as adults, and is probably the biggest pisstake in film history in terms how much of an extreme waste of time it is. for a film to so thoroughly enforce the idea that the characters’ actions are pointless and serve nothing is unbelievable. as a movie that should be a triumphant ending to the saga, we’re given what is explicitly told to us to be pointless.

It 2′s sin is that it doesn’t build up to anything. not storybeats, not relationships, often not even scares. things are laughably obviously telegraphed, even more so than It 2017′s often heavy-handed exposition. the movie wants us to care about the characters because of their past together, but rather than building off the first film’s two hours of story it instead patches in new settings and scenes that no viewer has any attachment to.

“remember the club house? you love the club house!” the film says, showing us to a set we’ve never seen before and have no reason to care about other than it dictates we have to now care about it. the first movie was incredibly well received and is now beloved, it has more than enough emotional moments to build off of, but the film rejects all that in favour of bringing up new ideas, new concepts that hardly get built upon. it demands you care, but doesn’t earn that compassion or attention.

unresolved issues is the name of the game in this movie; characters are constantly shown to have problems, huge, serious problems. Beverly is being abused by her husband, something we’re shown in overly graphic detail. Mike is suffering from untold trauma from standing vigil over Derry for years. Bill is fucking up his movie and his relationship with his wife. Richie is living a lie, deep within the closet. what’s most egregious is not just that these issues don’t get resolved, but that they never get addressed.

we are meant to believe that these characters care about each other, care deeply, have a connection that would drive them to die for each other, but no one notices that Bev is covered with bruises and is desperately avoiding home. no one questions Mike’s erratic, terrified behaviour. Bill forgets his wife exists. as i watched the movie i found myself asking, if Ben loves Beverly so much, why can’t he see her pain?

in the first movie, the characters’ issues were deeply entrenched in their psyche, were part of what Pennywise used to manipulate and attack them. in this movie, they haven’t moved on from their childhood issues and their adult issues are merely tacked on, lip service to the idea that they have grown up but a refusal to actually spend time examining what their issues as adults are. all the characters are suffering in some way, but they never share these things. for all their love and trust, they never developed past their childhood and they never learned how to be adults. their arcs from the first movie are reset completely; their development in that film never happened. for how little that film ties into this one and how much this one wants to retell history with new content, it might as well not have existed at all.

if It: Chapter 2 lacks anything, it’s tact. it’s carelessly violent and shallow, throwing around horrifying concepts and spending no time to flesh them out. while the idea in the book that Pennywise’s presence leads to more violence, abuse and bigotry deserves criticism, this film manages to do an even worse job. what in the book might be questionable and in need of updating becomes uncomfortable and thoughtless in the movie. the gay hate crime at the film is one of the most prominent examples; always a horrifying thing to read in the movie it serves even less purpose, exposes even less about the town, adds nothing, means nothing. goes nowhere.

let’s talk about being gay. let’s talk about Richie.

here’s a fun fact; discounting Nightmare on Elm Street 2 (as painful as it is for me to say this, as someone who fucking adores that movie) It: Chapter 2 is the first horror movie in a big franchise to have a gay hero, unless there’s some information i really badly need to be updated on. making Richie gay was a good move, and i think Richie was the perfect character to pick for it. he’s by far one of the two most likeable characters in the film, the most memorable, gets the best moments and the best lines.

but the conclusion the film gives him, combined with the hate crime earlier in the movie, after he spends the entire film in the closet letting no one know he is suffering, is that he will never be happy. he can’t open up to anyone about what he’s feeling; he never tells any of the others, even Eddie, the character strongly implied to be the love of his life. while Ben and Beverly are given one of the best and most visually striking setpieces of the film to reunite in, there is no such moment for Eddie and Richie. there is no catharsis for either of them.

while making Richie gay was an excellent idea, to try and throw a bone to us starving gays to have someone to cling to, but the ending of the movie left me feeling completely hollow. i did not want my takeaway from his character to be that he is traumatised beyond the point of any healing.

the politics of gay representation in this movie are bad, and so is race.

Stephen King is a writer with a dirty reputation for his habit of using “native americans” as shorthand for something magic and not understandable, and this film manages to not only dig up the few traces of this from the book but also make it worse, turning the ritual of chud (something that the book implied only worked because the characters believed in it and had no tie to native americans) into the act of ignorant, misinformed indigenous people who get not a single line to explain or defend themselves but are only allowed to be set dressing to later be ridiculed and demonised.

Mike, the sole black character of the movie, is served horribly in this film. while in  the novel he was one of the most important characters, a thoughtful librarian and historian carefully gathering the history of Derry to research the truth of It’s influence, he was given no screen time in the first movie and in this one is the detested outsider of the group. he is pushed into the position of mentor and guide, rather than friend, and comes across almost like the old stereotype of the magical black character, someone who is only there to provide guidance to the white leads through insight he mysteriously and magically possesses. the film stripped away his position as historian and researcher from the first movie and now scrambles to make up for that, leaving him without the history and characterisation to allow us to understand who and why he is.

on top of this, despite the enormity of his sacrifice to stay in Derry and the clear mental strain it’s put him through -- Isaiah Mustafa gives Mike more depth and thought than anyone else did and brings in his performance layers of subtlety this film doesn’t deserve -- the other characters are mocking and derisive of his attempts, don’t trust him and accuse him repeatedly of lying to and betraying them. these moments go nowhere, also. he is always immediately ‘forgiven’ without any thought as to his own suffering or the continual selflessness of his actions. he’s the thoughtless punchbag to a film in which the character continually martyrs himself for the comfort of others.

he isn’t even given the dignity of being called the leader of the group, despite doing everything for them and coming up with every idea. for some reason, the leader is nominated as Bill, despite James McAvoy’s performance being lackluster to the point of fading into the background entirely and the character of Bill doing next to nothing in the film at all.

but again -- the characters in It are not allowed to care about each other’s pain and suffering outside of a few moments. they come with their mental turmoil and they are either completely cured of it or allowed to remain in it, unmentioned again.

there’s not a bad actor in this -- James Ransone is astonishingly good, pitch-perfectly recreating Jack Dylan Grazer’s every mannerism, Bill Hader is both funny and heart-rendering when needed, Isaiah Mustafa moves mountains to make the script give him some depth, and Bill Skarsgard is again incredible as Pennywise -- but there’s also not an actor who isn’t horribly, horribly maligned by the script. Jessica Chastain, an actress of tremendous power and presence, is given next to nothing to do or say. more thought and care is given to Stephen King’s cameo as a shop owner than the role of Henry Bowers.

the film has its moments. Richie and Eddie are a delight, and the monster design and practical effects are again top of the line. it’s just a painful shame that so much talent and craft, the skills of the incredible artists and designers, the hard work of the enthusiastic and engaged cast and the intricacy of the sets are wasted on a movie that has no direction, no idea where it’s going and no point to make about anything.

also, it’s pretty fucking galling for a movie to continually make jokes about how despised a writer’s endings are only for it to take the far better ending of the book and discard it for something so ridiculous it was a strain not to laugh in the theatre.

It: Chapter 2 has no reason to be as bad as it is, but all the goodwill in the world can’t save a story this fragile, this pointless, and that refuses to engage with any of the subject it brings up to this degree. It wants us to take it very seriously indeed, but there’s nothing here to latch onto; this movie is someone screaming ‘oh the horror’ in a beautiful room filled with set dressings that crumble to ash.