Movie Review: IT

I can only speculate about what Steven King who wrote the It: A Novel many years ago was thinking about at the time. I think that King wrote this 1164 page novel about an evil clown because he was fascinated about the bullying so many young people have to endure in school and like the rest of us, wondered where this level of evil and cruelty comes from within a person so young. As most of us in this country have heard, bullying is an epidemic and in recent years this problem has become worse because of social media and cyber-bullying. We have all heard about news reports where some young person has committed suicide because of bullying or have gone on school shooting sprees, killing many people in retaliation, the most famous is the Columbine Massacre in 1999.

The evil clown known as Pennywise, played extremely well by actor Bill Skarsgård in the new movie "IT", is in fact a metaphor for bullying and this film very effectively explores where evil like this comes from correctly pointing out that all people who bully others actually feed on the fear in their victims. Bulling is about pure evil and people who bully others never think about retribution or about the short and long term damage they are inflicting on their victims. Bullies are all looking to temporarily escape their pain from abusive parents, self loathing for any number of reasons, by finding a victim who they can make feel much worse than they feel about themselves. Its a crime very unique to certain human beings and happens more in childhood, but it also happens when you are an adult and in the working world. As an adult we are bullied sometimes because we are afraid of losing our jobs, so we put up with abuse to make a living. Very often bullying as an adult is a game of leverage and as a result a tremendous amount of stress and anger occur. On the negative side, I thought some of the bullying scenes were too extreme to make the point the story was trying to make although it was effective in showing the fear, rage and anger bullying causes with the victims.

The horror scenes and special effects in this film were very well done but for my tastes sometimes too unnecessarily shocking and violent, especially in the beginning where a young boy has his arm cut off. The beginning of this movie concentrated a great deal on the young characters who are all victims of intense bullying in the high school they go to and its mostly towards the middle of the story that we see more scenes and visions of Pennywise. I thought that this strategy did establish the main message of this film very well.

I mostly agree with the high ratings from Rotten tomatoes and IMDB, 85% and 8.0 respectively and overall I thought that IT was a very good, but not great film that I do recommend.