The following article originally appeared in Juniata High School's newspaper The Arrowhead.  

*Spoiler and content warning* - This article contains spoilers and plot details from the 2017 version of IT. Please also be aware when reading that it is based off a book by Stephen King and is rated R. 

Walking into theater 5 last Sunday afternoon, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. Usually a huge advocate for reading the book before seeing the movie adaption, I hadn’t read the 1000 page novel before watching IT. I do, however, think that it would have been very beneficial to understanding the plot of the movie if I had read the book. Anyway, the movie begins with our main character Bill on the last day of school. He’s decided to dedicate his summer to finding out what happened to his younger brother Georgie, who has been missing for about a year. Coincidentally, Georgie isn’t the only one to have gone missing. Reluctantly, his friends (dubbed “The Losers Club”) join him. This is what ultimately leads them to learning about and finding ‘IT’. I felt like the scenes with all of the kids were very accurate and similar to how a lot of children around that age act. All of the child actors were given the opportunity to improvise when they felt it was right, which I think was a good idea. With all seven of them, there was a decent amount of comedic relief intertwined with the tense moments. 

Speaking of these tense moments, let’s talk about them. Automatically with a scary movie you think of demons or a masked man with a knife jumping out of the shadows, making you scream every five minutes, right? Eventually you get sick of it (no pun intended). Truthfully, there were only about three or four honest-to-goodness jump-scares in IT. (Nothing worse than when the snake jumped out in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, though. I have truly never jumped more during a movie than when that happened.) Additionally, the sound effects were amazing. When you knew that something scary was  going on, you not only saw it on screen, you not only heard it, but you also felt it vibrating your seat because the sound was that loud. In conjunction with sound effects comes the score, which I personally thought really helped add onto and to express what was happening on screen- more so than in other movies. One last thing that I thought they really did well with was the casting of characters. Not only the children, who obviously had incredible chemistry together and fit their parts very well, but Pennywise, (played by Bill Skarsgård), embraced their roles completely. 

A few things that I disliked about this movie were the way that they promoted it and the plot. Many of the posters or advertisements contained red balloons or pictures of Pennywise himself. However, we only see red balloons maybe three times in over two hours. Additionally, until the last 45 minutes of the movie, excluding the beginning, there are only flashes of Pennywise’s face. What we do see in the beginning and middle of the movie are different fears of each of the children, implying that he can change forms. In terms of plot, I thought that it got quite slow at some points. Maybe Pennywise needs to take a lot of naps and can’t be bothered to get out of his cave; I don’t really know. 

All in all, I thought that IT was a good movie, and I would watch it again, even if it is just to see Finn Wolfhard from Stranger Things. Before the second chapter comes out, I definitely need to work on reading the book!