A prequel series to It with a concrete three season plan? Bill Skarsgård returning as Pennywise? And here I thought that spooky season had ended!
A quick note before we actually get into the review. I'm going to be referring to the monster as Pennywise, even though we haven't seen the actual clown. It just makes things clearer as opposed to calling it "It" the whole time. Cool? Cool.
Prequels are hard, especially when you're dealing with an antagonist that exists in the original story. No matter what happens, our protagonists won't win. They can't! They can't kill Pennywise. They can only survive, at best, as the cycle continues on to the next generation. I'm not sure that It was something that needed a prequel, but I was willing to give it a shot and see if it was any good, especially since it's from the same team that did the recent movies.
So far, it is. Kinda. Mostly. It's more of a lukewarm recommendation than a full approval, and I think that there are just as many red flags planted for the future as there are green.
Overall, the horror is incredibly strong. The CGI during the horror is very spotty, but the horror itself is strong. I'm not a huge body horror person, but it's certainly effective. Especially if it's pregnancy related body horror. I can confidently say that I have never seen anything like what happened during the opening car scene before in my life. It was the underwear that pushed everything over the top for me. It was a clever, albeit gratuitous and borderline tasteless, detail, and I suspect that it was also the moment that turned a lot of people off.
They didn't need it, either. They were doing a great job with building dread and tension as the family that originally seemed friendly and helpful shifted from slightly weird and unsettling to downright threatening. They didn't need to go full CGI baby gargoyle that was still attached to the woman via placenta.
Yes, that is a sentence that you just read. Yes, it did fly around the car while still attached. No, you did not hallucinate that.
Moving beyond the opening scene, the episode as a whole continued to sell the dread very well. Derry is simply a fundamentally messed up town, and it's always disturbing to see adults ignore what is happening around them. That's what I'm probably the most interested to see going forward. I want to see more of Derry and how that town functions. I want to see more of how Derry looks from the adult perspective.
I'm just not sure if I want to see it from the military's perspective. Or maybe I'm just not sure about some of the writing surrounding Leroy. I get it. It's 1962. The Civil Rights Act is still another two years away. Derry is a predominantly white town, and Leroy is arriving as a Major, a position of authority. All of the writing just felt a little too pat.
Did his first interaction have to be with an aggressively racist underling, who was then immediately humiliated for being racist by General Shaw? I understand needing to establish things quickly, but come on. And what was up with the nighttime attack? Was that really Masters? I fully expected it to be a test of some kind to ensure that Leroy could be trusted with whatever Super Secret research they're doing, but maybe not. Unless blaming Masters for it is just an extension of the test to see if Leroy is smart enough and principled enough to investigate further.
Either way, I absolutely do not trust Shaw. I don't care how many times he insists that he doesn't tolerate racism on his base. He's shady, and so is his driver. The camera focused on him way too many times for him not to be significant moving forward.
Arguably the most important thing about Leroy is that his last name is Hanlon, making him the grandfather of Mike Hanlon. His family will be joining him soon, so we're going to be getting Mike's father, too.
Which is excellent because I really did not connect with any of our child characters. When I watched It, I rooted for the Losers' Club. I didn't necessarily like everyone, but I still wanted them to make it out with their lives and their sanity intact.
I didn't care about any of these kids. Phil was actively obnoxious and selfish. Teddy had incredibly uneven writing that sometimes devolved into the nonsensical, like when he told Phil that they should at least consider that Lily had heard Matty talking to her only to turn around and say that he didn't believe her literally three sentences later.
The writing in general was a little confusing. I'm still not sure whether or not Phil and Teddy actually went to Matty's birthday party, or if they ditched it even though Matty's mom paid them in candy to attend.
Speaking of Matty, he also seemed like a different character when you compared the opening scene to the flashbacks. Or maybe it was just the bright yellow pacifier that he was noisily sucking on despite being in middle school. It was just weird, and they didn't need it to stress that Matty was an ostracized weirdo that no one else really enjoyed being around.
We didn't really see a ton of Ronnie for her to be anything other than snarky and dismissive, so I'll tentatively withhold judgement on her for now.
Lily is the only kid that is consistently characterized that I actually liked. I'm not sure if she was actually part of the popular girl group or if she and Marge were always in that awkward hanger-on liminal space, but having her go from that to being called Loony Lily is definitely a fall in grace for a preteen.
You would think that losing your father in a horrific accident would earn you some grace, but this is Derry. I'm also not quite sure why she's supposedly Loony. The urban legend about how pieces of her father were found in pickle jars felt very much like a legend that would actually form and spread, though. I'm sure we'll see that exact scare at some point.
But most of all, I wasn't sold on following around a Proto-Losers' Club knowing that they would fail. Not only did it feel a little bit too much like a retread of the movies, but it made everyone feel less special. Centering the story around kids is unavoidable at some point, sure, but there are other dynamics and social circles that the show could have explored instead.
The good news is that almost everything that I've complained about in that last section? It doesn't matter! They went ahead and slaughtered the Proto-Losers' Club!
I couldn't believe it! I thought that Pennywise would merely scare the kids because that's how these things work. It's only the first episode, after all, and they're all together. There's safety in numbers. But no! Pennywise killed them! Dismembered them! Dead! Gone!
My jaw was on the floor when Teddy's head hit the window, and it only got bloodier from there. Not even little Sue was safe.
I wasn't going to review this show until that moment. Now, I'm hooked and I have to see what happens next. What a great way to introduce stakes and threat into the story. Pennywise can operate with nigh impunity. No character is protected.
Random Thoughts
There are a ton of easter eggs here, and I'm sure that I missed most of them.
The school sign said to duck and cover. I was born after the Cold War, so seeing stuff like that always catches my attention because it doesn't feel like a real thing that places actually did.
Turtles are good luck.
According to my research, they actually did use some practical effects when it came to the demonic baby. A shame that it just never looked good regardless of if it was practical or not.
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An Honest Fangirl loves video games, horror movies, and superheroes, and occasionally manages to put words together in a coherent and pleasing manner.
Thank you for reviewing this! I've had an annoying week, so I decided to renew my HBO subscription and, even though I don't really like kids in peril or most Stephen King adaptations, this is sorta exactly what I need right now.
ReplyDeleteWeird, irrelevant observation: I really love the clothes. Maybe because they're unfancy late 50s/early 60s, so they seem less like costumes and more like something vaguely transferable to the present day.