by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
Why is it so hard to bring the wonderful novel IT to the screen, be it big or small? While I wish the producers of IT: Chapter 2 all the best, I’m afraid I walked out about a third of the way through.
Now, some context. I’ve read the novel IT numerous times. I’m working on a novel of my own. I’m obsessed with storytelling right now and so I have very high standards. Maybe too high for my own good — I keep walking out of movies when they don’t meet my personal storytelling demands.
Anyway, I will note that the always talented and beautiful Jessica Chastain was a personal highlight of what I saw. She’s a damn good actor. And James McAvoy also was great. Fan favorite Bill Hader was good, but underused. In the novel, the character he played was the master of voices. That Hader — who is great at voices — wasn’t introduced constantly doing them was a big disappointment. Also Hader still has a lingering problem for me personally of me seeing him on the big screen and going, “Hey, that’s Bill Hader!” The rest of the cast was completely generic. The first movie was a huge hit, you’d think they would spend the extra cash to use marquee names in to fill the rest of the adult Losers.
I left the movie when I had to use the bathroom because I felt the movie was a mess. It was so much of a mess that it was grating on my nerves. If I was writing the “modern” part of the IT story as a screenplay, I would focus on making it a good screenplay first and telling the novel’s story second. It seemed to me they wanted it both ways. The whole thing was muddled and annoying in the extreme.
But what really pushed me to leave the movie early was I realized something about my novel because what I had seen. After I realized how to fix a problem in the novel I’m writing, I realized I had no more need of a movie that was quickly growing to be a waste of time.
So I left.
