Marcus Smith
Lantern Staff
It will scare you. It will have you at the edge of your seat. It will make you jump. It will make you laugh. It will make you scream. It might even make you cry.
IT was a great movie that lived up to the hype that it received. The cast was put together perfectly from Jaeden Lieberher executing Bill’s stutter perfectly to Finn Wolfhard playing the sarcastic and hilarious Richie amazingly. Finding such young actors that play their roles this well are hard to come by.
The movie takes place in Derry, Maine in the year 1988, when Bill (Jaeden Liebergher) gives his little brother Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) a paper sailboat to float down the streets on a rainy day. Once Georgie loses his boat, he meets Pennywise, the clown (Bill Skarsgard), also known as It, and is then taken, which is where this story begins.
The main characters in this movie is a group of kids that refer to themselves as The Losers’ Club. When the Losers’ are not running from the killer clown, Pennywise, they are running from a less terrifying character, Henry (Nicholas Hamilton), the school bully. The teenagers soon learn that they need to stop running from their fears that are both the clown and the bully.
Whether the teenagers were supposed to be playing a terrified child or a fearless one, it did not matter because they did both tremendously. The teens were most terrified at the beginning of the film when they did not know what was going on. Beverly (Sophia Lillis), the lead female role, has a rough home life. Throughout the movie, her dad reminds her she is still his little girl, which is a quick look into what we can all assume happens in their house. You can tell how scared she is of her dad the second they are on-screen together.
Wolfhard, who is well known for his lead role in the Netflix original series Stranger Things as Mike, plays Richie in IT. Richie is the character in this movie that makes it such a difficult movie to not laugh at. He causes the theatre to spend more of their time laughing than they do screaming. He says things along the line of “How did I draw the short straw? You’re lucky this wasn’t a dick measuring contest.” This is just one example of one of his many hilarious jokes. Even when Richie is in a life or death situation, he is still finding some way to make the audience laugh.
If you are wanting to go and see a jump-out-of-your-seat screaming scary movie, this is not the one for you. There definitely are some scary parts, but it is overall not as scary as I had hoped. There are many scenes that make you hide your face, but then it has you wondering why you were so scared.
Where IT lacked on the scary side, it made up with its phenomenal overall story and of course, its comedy and heart. Between the young boys making their dick jokes, mom jokes and their ridiculous cursing, it will make you laugh. Although it was not as terrifying as most may have hoped, it is still a must see movie.
