By: Sadie Dodds
“It 2” is the sequel to the 2017 movie “It.” This movie features the older versions of the main characters in the original film: Beverly, Richie, Eddie, Stanley, Bill, Ben, and Mike as they fight the shape-shifting, cannibalistic clown, It for the second time. Each kid, except Mike, left town as soon as they could and slowly forgot everything about their old town, Derry, including It. Suddenly, Mike calls them all back. Soon, we realize that the reason for this return is that It has come back, and they are the only ones who can defeat It. So they band together to save their town.
There has been a recent trend in media where creators have been leaning more towards making remakes, adaptations, and sequels rather than creating new content. Live-action “Aladdin,” “Joker,” “Ocean’s Eight,” “Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2,” “Frozen 2,” “Glass,” live-action “The Lion King,” and many many more. Hollywood must have found that these will do better than any new material they might make. Generally, these remakes, adaptations, and sequels are adequate, worse than the original, undoubtedly but still fine. In my opinion, “It 2” is much better than I would have expected.
“It 2” is a sequel to a remake of an adaption of a book. Stephen King wrote the original text in 1986, the original adaptation movie came out in 1990, the remake of this movie came out in 2017, and we got this sequel on September 6, 2019. Given all of this, I had expected the film to feel repetitive and boring, but, in fact, it felt relatively fresh.
The characters felt real and not as though they had already had character arcs in three different sources. The way each character reacted to different situations was the way a real person would respond. When It chased them, they screamed. When they were hanging out as friends, they laughed. When they were in danger, they tried to save themselves. They weren’t fake-scared, or fake-happy, or fake-heroic, they were real. Sometimes, they would make a choice or say something, and there would be a moment of either staged comedy or staged drama, but the result would be a realistic response.
Another surprisingly enjoyable part of this movie was its comedy. I thought that “It 2’s” comedy would be cheesy and forced, but I caught myself laughing a few times. The actors told the jokes in a way that made it seem like they knew that people were expecting cheese, and so they just accepted it. They went with the ludicrousy of putting humor into intense and overplayed horror scenes, and it worked. The jokes hit as they should and got the perfect reaction from the audience.
And of course, the horror: it was probably the best part of this sequel/remake/adaptation because it was the part that is already played over and over in the same way. All horror movies have similar tropes: jump scares, dark basements, scary houses, etc. But the reason that people do them repeatedly is that they can get away with it. For some reason, these tropes never get tired and are always scary, so they worked just as well in this movie as they did in the original so long ago.
All in all, this movie was much better than I had expected, given its repetitive origin. Now, don’t get me wrong, this movie wasn’t earth-shattering, it was pretty much a repeat of the original, but the creators made it work, and I would definitely recommend it.
The Snapper 