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‘IT: Chapter Two’ is a Big, Emotional Horror Blockbuster [Review]
Pennywise and the Losers Club return for an imperfect sequel that’s both big in scares and intimate in scope.
Andy Muschietti’s It (2017) was at once a big budget horror film and a small, intimate coming-of-age story. With a winning cast of kids, a healthy dose of ’80s nostalgia, and a chilling performance by Bill Skarsgård, It rode critical and audience acclaim to become the biggest R-rated horror film of all time at the box office. And when it ended with a title card declaring it the first chapter, a speculation on a sequel immediately started. Could Muschietti capture the magic we’d just witnessed a second time?
The answer here is, he didn’t have to. King’s novel intertwines two storylines: the group of children that the first film focused on, and those same characters twenty-seven years later, confronting their childhood trauma. It: Chapter Two focuses on the adult storyline, while interjecting flashbacks to the characters’ child counterparts.
By nature, the adult segments of King’s novel are darker, and the horror more introspective. That means Chapter Two was never going to be anything like its spooky, but light-hearted predecessor. They are two very different stories told in tandem with each other.
