It Chapter Two (2019) Review

THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS OF THE DISCUSSED FILM. READERS DISCRETION IS ADVISED.

Like every Stephen King adaptation beforehand, adapting It was a challenge because the goal is to ultimately get the material done right and be as faithful as possible. The 1990 mini-series was excessively restrained due to the budget alone, which is why it was a miracle Warner Bros. let loose on it to give creative freedom for Director Andy Muschietti to helm the two part feature. When the success became reality for Chapter One, the worries were over for the sequel.


PLOT


2019’s Chapter Two takes place in 2016, 27 years after The Losers Club confronted the shapeshifting entity nicknamed Pennywise the Dancing Clown. It re-emerges after killing openly gay Adrian Mellon (Xavier Dolan), moments after he and his boyfriend Don Hagarty (Taylor Frey) were jumped by teenage homophobes. Mellon’s death gets the attention of Michael Hanlon who has stayed in Derry as a town librarian. When he sees a sign marked in blood, “Come Home”, he alerts his friends to keep true to their blood oath to finish the job should it ever return. Bill Denbrough is a successful author and is married to actress Audra Phillips (Jess Weixler), but has been ridiculed by peers on how he concludes his stories. Richie Tozier has been a successful comic, Ben Hanscom has made a success as an architecture and Eddie Kaspbrak works as a risk analyst, but the latter’s wife Myra is much overprotective like his mother Sonia (both played by Molly Atkinson) that his hypochondria returns. Beverly Marsh is a fashion designer, but she escapes an abusive marriage from her husband Tom Rogan (Will Beinbrenk) before rejoining the others. They all reunite at a restaurant where Mike reminds them of what they gotta do. As they catch up, they start remembering the memories they repressed of their childhood. Pennywise then scares them all with not only visions of their food coming to life, but taunts them of the fact Stanley Uris took his life out of fear. This fears Bev because when she was exposed to It’s deadlights as a teen, she saw visions of their death(s) which included Stan. Knowing this has the rest of the guys scared to the point they want to leave and abandon their promise to one another. As the Losers Cub gather at a hotel, Mike shows Bill It’s history through via root hallucination. It crash landed on Earth millions of years prior to their first encounter in ‘89, and a Native American tribe, the Shokopiwah, performed the Ritual of Chüd, a battle of wits between both parties when last confronting it. This convinces Bill to continue take a stand who in turn convinces the others. By the next day, they go to the forest and find an old clubhouse Ben made for them during their childhood. There, Mike explains they each need a totem to strengthen their odds for the ritual to work. In honor of Stan, they collect a shower cap he’d wear for clubhouse occasions. When the group splits up to find their own, Bill goes to search for his and as he buys back his old bike ‘Silver’, he passes by his childhood home and finds the sewer drain where his brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) was taken by Pennywise. His guilt is still heavy due to how he never was sick on that rainy day, pretending to be that day because he didn’t want to play with him. And when he asked the creature why it took him, it mockingly replied because he wasn’t there. As Bill reaches into the sewer drain, mistakingly hearing his brother’s voice, he grabs his own totem that was the paper boat he made for his brother. Richie gets his totem that is an arcade token from an old theater he used to go to. He recounts being attacked by It in the form of the town’s statue shortly being bullied of his closeted homosexuality by Henry Bowers when he was a kid. In the present, Pennywise scares him as it also taunts him of his secret, causing him to run away. Eddie decides his totem to be his inhaler once he recounts how It pretended to be a leper attacking his mother. He ran away at the time but in the present, he stands up to It enough for him to decide. Bev finds her totem to be the poem Ben wrote for her in their childhood. She finds it in the old apartment where she used to live with her father Alvin (Stephen Bogaert), whose abuse originated from the grief of his wife’s death. She meets an elderly woman named Mrs. Kersh, who turns out to be It in another form who chooses to terrify her when converting to a more demonic form, causing her to run away. As for Ben, he collects Bev’s school yearbook signature which he holds dearly because she was the only one to sign it at the time. For him, he recounts Pennywise mocking how she didn’t reciprocate the same feelings then. When regrouping at the hotel, Eddie gets attacked by Bowers who escaped a mental hospital with the assist of It. Eddie does get stabbed in the cheek, but he defends himself by stabbing him back in his chest, causing him to retreat. Having already killed a little girl named Victoria (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) in the middle of a baseball game at night, It plans to go after another child named Dean (Luke Rosseler), who lives at Bill’s old home. Denbrough tries to save the boy by following him at a public circus. He tries to warn him in a house of mirrors, but Pennywise gets to him first and devours him in front of the adult. By night, Mike waits for the others after already collecting his totem in advance, which is the same rock Bev threw at Bowers that solidified their friendship. The adult Bowers attacks him at the library, but gets killed by Richie. Feeling all the more guilty than before, Bill calls Mike and vows going in alone but the others catch up with him at the abandoned well house where they last confronted It. The entity quickly tries to torment the group when taking the form of Stan’s decapitated head with spider limbs, while carving a message on Ben’s stomach through a reflection “Home at last”. Bev undoes Ben’s injury when breaking a mirror and when they dispose of Stan’s spider head, they head into the well and beyond the sewer where It crash landed. They try to perform the ritual when burning their totems and chanting ‘Turn light into dark’, but none of it works. It would return to confirm it never did work for the Shokopiwah. The group would be disappointed that Mike never told them that part, but Hanlon defends his case that it had to have been because they never believed. It takes another form that is a giant Pennywise-spider hybrid and attack them one last time. It places Bill, Ben & Bev in individual hallucinations while Mike, Richie & Eddie retreat from its tentacles. Bill escapes his hallucination once he releases his guilt over George, whereas Ben & Bev escape together when he reminds her he wrote the poem. When Richie gets caught into a catatonic state thanks to dead light exposure, Eddie tries to save him only to be fatally stabbed. Before his final breath, he shares to his group how he was able to make it feel small when standing up to its leper form. This inspires the remaining group to make it feel small by calling it out of its harmless forms, which in turn makes it believe it is. Their consistency on it works as it ends up shrinking and shrivel into a powerless shell of its self. Mike then rips out the heart and destroys it. With the creature defeated, the Losers Club leave the well house before it collapses. They then choose mourn over their loss as they swim at the quarry again. In the film’s epilogue, the Losers Club begin a new chapter in our lives without dormant fear: Ben & Bev begin a relationship together and Richie (before resuming to his career) re-carves Eddie’s initials on the town’s kissing bridge, confirming he was in love with him before he died. Mike prepares moving out of Derry for the first time and later reaches out to Bill (now inspired to write a better ending for his next book) that Stan wrote letters to them all where he admitted he chose to remove himself from the equation knowing his fear would hold his friends back and wanted to give them a fighting chance which had proven to work.


THOUGHTS


My expectations were low this time around because I knew all the patience done with Chapter One was gonna differ here. Having said that, I’m still impressed with this other half overall because Muschietti is able to bring the story full circle in grounded fashion. Benjamin Wallfisch’s score is as eery as before to make the scares authentic in their own way and the cinematography by Checco Varese accurately brings feelings of utter claustrophobia to freedom that our group of protagonists go through. You can admit the visual effects were a big benefit on giving life to It’s vicious forms like Mrs. Kerch, Stan’s spider head, a demonic dog, a statue or a spider clown hybrid. The strength of the horror we see of course is going to go to the returning Bill Skarsgard who is still able to be tremendously vicious as Pennywise. The way he disarms its prey by either giving false charm or wickedly get the jump on those just too incapable of having any upper hand. It was also so convincing to the point it still had power to convince Bowers to do his bidding, knowing how much of an advantage the Losers Club had off of being together. I was already scared of Nicholas Hamilton from the first half, but Teach Grant dials up how far he’s gone with his sanity. He basically comes like the Renfield of the story and Pennywise is his Dracula because he doesn’t care who and how he harms as it will satisfy him either way in unsettling fashion. It feels poignant for the creature to be defeated by rapid insults the way it did to the Losers Club because it spent the whole lifetime making Derry feel such only to get a taste of his own medicine being its weakness. That just comes to show how some threats are not as formidable we could mistake them to be. The return of the Losers Club being adults to finish the job was a poetic way to tell how the benefit on feeling stronger to confront the past before it can bring you back down you know it. And once you face your fears, there will no other obstacle to restrain you in life. This is exactly what the group went through and it was incredible of a payoff for sure thanks to the adult ensemble in my eyes be able to give their own chemistry to match what the children did the first time around. With James McAvoy showing infinite range in Split & Glass, I would not doubt how well he was able to play Bill. In my eyes, he is able to accurately reflect the same amount of regret Jaeden Martell expressed as a grieving brother. With more context, we understand how much he hates himself for something he couldn’t have known would happen which made the chain of events a miracle for him to get over what happened to Georgie. Like the others, the reunion was the first step for him to regain their happiness as it was together where they were able to keep it after putting the past behind them for good. He couldn’t write a good ending for his books because he knew his wasn’t over yet, thus making it bittersweet for him to find a better narrative once his was officially done for. It was crazy for James Ransone to be adult Eddie because he actually resembled his child counterpart Jack Dylan Grazer in uncanny fashion. Putting that aside, he nails the aspect on how his own timid-ness makes him doubt he can do anything until he proves anything. His death was a gigantic bummer because he had finally unleashed his confidence he didn’t know he had and didn’t get to embrace further more. Another death that was saddening was easily Stan. Andy Bean was able to match the same skepticism Wyatt Oleff expressed before. He knew how scared he was and didn’t want to be a reliability, thus checking his name off the board in a selfless take as said in his letter, rather than depict himself to be a coward. His letter was satisfying to hear because it was able to tell us to never let go of the youth that made you happy or you won’t have said feeling as you get older. Understanding this, it’s safe to say the remaining group will stand by this to make sure his and Eddie’s deaths were not in vain. When Finn Wolfhard suggested Bill Hader to be adult Richie, I couldn’t unsee it and was satisfied to see the casting come true. Hader was the best of the adult cast for not only being funny with every joke but also showed how he had his own vulnerability due to a secret he wasn’t sure how to share. Discovering he was gay the whole time and had a crush on Eddie confirms how much he used comedy as a shield of his true feelings, wanting to be stronger than he seemed. Knowing he got to survive and Eddie didn’t was devastating because it felt certain he could’ve opened up should he have survived as well. But now, it’s no doubt he’ll have to try to be without him knowing he would’ve wanted that. Isaiah Mustafa was great as Mike for choosing to show him as one who had to be a lighthouse keeper for the town in order to make sure the promise was kept. In one way, he sounded delusional for knowing more than he did as a kid, proving how in fact desperate he is to be free from all the mental pain once and for all. He couldn’t tell the group that the ritual didn’t work the first time around because he knew they would’ve bailed and the reunion would’ve been all for nothing. The fact he’s still alive by the time it’s over, it’s obvious to say it was worth it. Jay Ryan was also great as Ben for quickly breaking out of his past shyness in order to finally be content with his life. His fear was being alone and he faced it which in his turn was worth it since he got to pursue his long lost love. From one redhead to another, it was a natural move for Jessica Chastain to be the adult counterpart for Sophia Lillis which was predictably a great choice since the former lived up to the hype. Chastain accurately presents her to be a bold lady who knew when to seek independence. She was still strong enough to do it when it came to breaking apart from her husband and overcoming her inner fear of maturity. With every moment of bravery, she proves herself she had it in her all along. Luckily, she also finds her true love to the one guy who first saw her as an equal. You still can’t blame her for thinking Bill wrote the poem because she remembers how much she admired his natural leadership. Ben was still the right choice not just off of the fact Denbrough was already married, but again they both had the most pure hearts. And if purity isn’t enough to make two people one, then that is a damn shame. In this case, it does and it’s sweet they get to be happy together. This movie is still pretty good, but there are still some questionable moments that make me prefer the first one. Like it’s common for films have rewrites during production, but it’s ridiculous how the studio barely tells Bill about wanting a new ending for one of his novel’s adaptations. I mean it doesn’t seem like he wouldn’t turn them down if they were upfront about their opinion(s). I also didn’t like how anxiety was forced onto Eddie’s re-introduction when the car honks at him. Even if it’s common for everyone to honk at each other in NY, it was pointless because it didn’t seem like he was driving too slow or too fast. His phone call with his wife already got the message across that he hasn’t changed much after he left. And ain’t it crazy how calm Dean’s parents were when Richie freaks out over mistaking the kid to be It? I mean I’d go apeshit crazy if someone was yelling at my kid for no valid reason. Even his little sister was so calm of the misunderstanding and it’s weird as fuck. Also, why the hell is Victoria’s mom so invested in the baseball game? Is one of her relatives in it like a son or young brother? If so, that would validate the ignorance that led to Vicky’s wandering. Moving on, I don’t see the point of Richie trying to wait for the others to leave with him. They came in separate cars, so he has no true reason to wait for anyone so long until he changes his mind. I do think it’s cute for the Losers club to have a clubhouse in their childhood, but why wasn’t that hinted in Chapter One? Not hinting its advance is so weird of an introduction because it doesn’t clarify when exactly did they start using it because they weren’t together all summer. I then think Stan having a shower cap doesn’t make sense because he never worried about his hair during the first movie when cleaning Bev’s bloody bathroom. I know a lot of things can be left behind when closing up something like a theater, but I don’t believe the fact those arcade games were left there. In the generation this movie takes place in, they would’ve been taken whether stolen or bought off of for whatever the valuable-ness. And how come no one saw the statue come to life or saw the well house get taken down? I know the presence of It has made people too ignorant to notice, but those two things feel impossible to do so compared to a bully like Bowers. Also, I know Bowers is unstable, but why would he say ‘One down’ when he didn’t kill Eddie? He stabbed him in the cheek and chose to leave after Kaspbrak defends himself so that shit can’t count. It’s honestly a weird way to set up him going after Mike and he doesn’t even sneak up on him like he did before which was ridiculous. Other than that, this sequel still works for what it’s going for. In short, It Chapter Two gets the job done in being an appropriate conclusion after showing enough of the essential elements of remaining story to satisfy every fan possible. If you enjoyed the first film dearly, I hope you enjoy this as well.