The second IT movie is out. It’s the ending of King’s story and it’s a long ending. The movie is almost 3 hours long and things happens all the time. The first movie ended with the young Losers defeating IT. Or at least they thought they did. The all took an oath that if IT ever came back, they would as well and once again battle it. Now with the second movie we meet the Losers 27 years later. They have all grown up and all but Mike have left Derry. They have careers and lives and their childhood in Derry is long forgotten…until Mike calls them saying IT’s back and they need to come home.

In the first movie we got to follow the young Losers and now we see them as adults. But there are a lot of flashbacks and memories from when they were kids and I think they have succeeded very well in making the kids look like they did in the first film despite the fact that they are now 27 years older.

The first half of the movie is about the reunion of the Losers Club and Mike telling them what happened and what they need to do. And it’s not a solid “yes, we’re going to do it” from the members. In fact, several of them decide to leave and never come back but eventually Mike convinces them that they need to do this or they will all die.

So far so good…

Now we enter the second part of the movie. The battle part. After deciding they will try to defeat IT once and for all they all experience things from the past. Bev visits her old home, Bill finds his old bike and so on. After that they all encounter IT and have to fight their way out of it’s traps. Then comes the big finale where they are supposed to kill IT. Each of these scenes works but since there are so many Losers there are a lot of scenes that all have the same theme. They have to escape from IT and even though all the scenes are different they are all variations of each other and at one point it’s almost too much. Maybe the movie would have benefitted if a few of them had been cut out? And while I’m complaining, some of the scenes are also a bit over the top. I think they would have been scarier if they would have been toned down a bit. Now they are very visual and that’s nice, but they are not that scary.

All in all though it’s a good movie. They have captured the feeling from the book and done a great job transforming it for the screen. The ending in the book is almost impossible to transform to the screen in a satisfying way so I did have some concerns about how they would solve that issue. I think that the ending they settled for unfortunately makes it way too easy for the kids to defeat IT and there was never any doubt that they would succeed.

For IT: Chapter 2 to be not just a good movie but a great movie they would have needed to make it scarier (now there are a few scary and uncomfortable scenes but not much that’s really, really scary) and they would have needed to come up with an ending that would have made me feel Pennywise actually had a chance.

We get a lot of cameos in this one and the three that I like the best are:

#1: Stephen King as a second-hand store owner who sells Bill his old bike.
#2: Brandon Crane who plays young Ben in the miniseries from 1990. He’s in the scene where the grown-up Ben is presented.

#3: Andy Muschietti himself is standing in the pharmacy as Eddie is there to pick up his prescription.