It

1990 | Tim Curry | Olivia Hussey | Stephen King | Book Adaptations I had only seen this once before in like 2017, maybe even a bit earlier, and while I certainly enjoyed it, I definitely didn’t love it. I felt it fell short of its reputation as a truly scary film that scared tons of people when they first saw it. It didn’t do that for me. Revisiting it now after having read Stephen King’s monumental novel, it also falls short of that one. Never does it reach the greatness of the book and it doesn’t necessarily manage to conjure up the same emotions or feelings. I like it tho, a lot. The second part when they’re adult isn’t as good as the part when they’re kids and the fact that this is a made-for-TV mini-series really does show. Both in production values and general quality as well as in writing and the way they adapt King’s masterpiece. This takes a lot of creativity liberties which makes sense. There’s no way you could adapt the book completely faithful, both because of its length and because some of it just isn’t adaptable. Their final stand-offs with It just wouldn’t translate to the screen. But this also leaves out so much stuff, some of which I think is rather essential, like the murder of Adrian Mellon, and it drastically shortens many important beats. And pretty much every encounter with Pennywise is completely changed, not for the better in my opinion. There’s barely any violence and pretty much everything that’s even remotely too edgy for network television is left out. It also makes many character changes, most of which are kinda whatever, but I didn’t like that they made adult Richie into kind of an asshole. But I still enjoyed this. The parts when they are kids especially cause liked the dynamic between, although the characters are barely fleshed-out. From the adults I liked Dennis Christopher’s Eddie the best cause how couldn’t you, I mean really. I hated Bill’s ponytail tho and I’m glad we can collectively agree that it makes the film palpably worse. All in all, the 1990 adaptation of “It” works more than it doesn’t. It’s far from perfect and suffers from a lack of real depth and quality all around, which isn’t helped by some rather unnecessary changes to the source material. It’s falls short of the book and doesn’t do it justice, but it’s a fine film.