This show is good enough for its own discussion thread, so here it is.
I do wish some of the creature stuff was being done more practically, but there’s strong horror imagery and cool design ideas present.
And they hit a jackpot with this cast of kids; excellent young performers in the big and small roles.
I thought the kids in the premiere were pretty awful, by and large.
Lucky (for us), we aren’t stuck with them for the long haul…
I didn’t think they were well-served by the dialogue, but other than that, I thought those two performances were good.
I still need to catch up with episode 2, but I thought the kids were mostly pretty good. I was gearing up for 8 episodes with them at the forefront, and I wasn’t minding it too much, but kudos to Muschietti for playing around with our expectations like that; probably one of the more surprising final 10 minutes of TV in the past few years.
To reiterate from the other thread, I came around on episode 1 quite a bit the more I sat with it. And I would say the final ten minutes pretty much made it.
Feels like we’re doing a sort of Stephen King Fargo, which by my count is for the third time (Castle Rock and Midnight Mass). This seems to really be working when it does that, and I already see plot ideas from The Shining (obviously), The Mist and The Tommyknockers populating the edges. And much like the first Muschietti It, I think this is doing a really terrific job of presenting its tertiary characters in the way reminiscent of how King does. The colorful yokel assholes here are great.
It seems to be directly tackling the Mike Hanlon sections of the book, which are of course some of the best material, but the easiest to cut for an adaptation, because it lifts out so cleanly. Might have been a great idea to take it and expand on it. In fact, making 50s racial strife the backbone of the narrative actually serves to make it feel more like the novel than ever, even with new characters. I assume the show is building to a certain sequence from the novel that ends the cycle, and I could see that effectively being the Red Wedding of this season. It’s one of the best things King’s written and I hope they do it!
After being lowkey annoyed by Mike and the racial elements of the book being more or less cut out or sidelined to Ben in the movies, this show almost feels like an apology in a meta way. I too noticed that Inferno shot in the trailer.
This is a cool development that I was not really expecting. The military stuff also feels like maybe we’re getting the origins of The Shop.
Also reminds me I should go back and finish CASTLE ROCK.
One of the oddest discussions I’ve been seeing is people hating on Lilly for not telling the truth to the cop and getting Ronnie’s dad arrested. Not mad at the cop for threating and coercing a tween into saying she wasn’t 100% sure Hank was in the building. Lilly was in a no win situation. She tells the truth(mutant demon baby that came from the screen), the cop can say she is crazy and arrests Hank and Lilly goes to the asylum. The way this show is going I’m betting Lilly survives only to be lobotomized in the asylum. Will is the only one that should make it clean.
The reason I stump so hard for the Muschietti films, second one included, is because they plainly understand the novel (despite the problems they had dramatizing it). And something that it really got right is that the reason the Losers survived as children was because of their bond of fellowship. They become something greater than themselves when they’re together, which is the white magic version of the power of childhood belief that Pennywise preys on. They’ve got each other’s backs, and that’s the only reason they make it.
So, if that’s absent, what then? The monsters get them. And the kids in Welcome To Derry do not have that core of courage and camaraderie. These kids are scattered, lonely, and too preoccupied with their immediate social capital to stand against the darkness. The kids in the first episode were to ashamed to embrace the dorky kid, and thought it would reflect badly on them. So when It appears, it plays on that, with the Music Man sequence, and they die screaming and afraid. Even the little girl, who’s blameless! And I’m already shuddering imagining what cruel fate awaits Marge, the little nerdy girl with glasses, who’s committing the cardinal sin of ten-year-old moral cowardice. I expect it’ll be the nastiest moment in the season.
It’s essentially Goosebumps morality plays, except instead of, I don’t know, getting turned into a housefly or whatever happens in Goosebumps, the kids are dispatched in mortal terror, with some of the most nightmarish horror imagery in recent memory. Pretty fucking bleak! That pickle jar sequence was out of control.
This is a FASCINATING “adaptation”. Because obviously, fans of the book know the recent movie adaptation was shifted around and modernized. In the book the Losers flashbacks are in the 50’s and the modern day is the then current 80’s. For the films flashbacks are 80’s and modern day is the new modern day.
So that leaves this version of IT with the 50’s culture essentially untouched, even though lots of important world-building canon events happen during that time period that don’t necessarily directly involve the Losers. So here in the early 60’s we have an adaptation that both has nothing to do with the book at all with kids we don’t know, and also is able to pull from canon in meaningful ways.
It’s a very interesting, weird mix of adaptive circumstances that I don’t think I’ve seen before.
It’s a little like DOCTOR SLEEP, which incorporates un-adpated elements of THE SHINING novel’s conclusion alongside the climax of DOCTOR SLEEP’s narrative.
That’s a good point!
I really wish the CGI in this show was better, or that there was less of it. That cemetery chase was kind of shockingly bad.
Is that the most important thing? No (the character work is generally very good, and that’s more important), but it does make it feel like a much cheaper enterprise.
Both the show and movie really suffer every time It bares its multiple rows of shiny CGI fangs.
Graveyard chase was full on Goosebumps movie.
Liked the Halloran stuff much more than I would have imagined, if you just told me that was going to happen. They nailed it with the casting.
Or a Haunted Mansion movie.
Which would be fine in those contexts, but not here.
Even in the second ep the kid killing only barely offsets the bad cgi.
The context can sometimes provide some cover.
I rewatched the cemetery sequence again, and I can’t believe anybody thought that was going to work. Not just because of bad effects, but because the tone doesn’t seem right, either.
Sounds like a classic Stephen King setpiece!
Maybe DREAMCATCHER Stephen King.