Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 12/21/2024

IT

A couple of years ago, I decided that I was going to read Stephen King's novels in publishing order until they bored me. I've made it into his 80s output, and I picked up IT, his magnum opus. Reading it in about a month, the 1200 page novel is...a complete and total mess. The first 20% had me hooked, though. It was great. There was this promise and sense of ill-defined danger that worked marvelously well as King jumped us between 1958 and 1985 with this sense of impending doom infecting everything.

And then things began to unravel. He focuses fully on 1958 for a long stretch, and it feels like a more typical King novel than the promise of greatness that had started things. There's a heavy issue with repetitive vignettes that don't actually feel that dangerous because kids keep escaping the central monster. The adults don't actually have a whole lot to do, and when they do become the focus just after the halfway point, they also go through their repetitive, but not dangerous vignettes. Things really pick up again in the final 20% of the book when the jumping between time periods ramps up as both adults and children go into the sewers underneath the central New England town of Derry, Maine, danger ramping up once more. And then...King lets his freak flag fly while also demonstrating that he doesn't know how to pull off endings or fulfill the promise of Lovecraftian horror like he would dream.

And yet...there are people who love this book. Love it. Think it's one of the greatest pieces of English literature ever written. I'm only noting that I don't agree, and I think I am closer to the general consensus which is: good, not great, and could use real editing (I'd go with okay, not good, and in need of an axe).

In the context of film, that presents an interesting question. The book has been adapted twice over the past thirty-five years. The first was on network television, a three-hour mini-series on ABC directed by Tommy Lee Wallace (an early close compatriot of John Carpenter). The second was a two-part, big budget, feature film directed by Andy Muschietti. With such a large, messy, and generally accepted flawed original source material, it presents an interesting case study in how to approach adaptations. Add in the fact that both filmed versions are actually quite different from each other, and you've got an interesting slice of cinematic adaptation.

And, as a note, this is going to feel a fair bit opaque to those not at least passingly familiar with the characters. Sorry, but I don't think I can drag this out another 1,000 words to give that clarity. It's way too long as it is.

The Book

I'm reminded of a quote from Orson Welles when discussing his own approach to adaptation saying, that it's required of a filmmaking making an adaptation to make changes. The mediums are simply different and cannot transfer directly. The most loyal adaptation that recreates every line would just be a recitation of the book's text with still images. One must change things, a lot of things, to adapt. So, IT is kind of an ideal source. There's going to be disagreement about what to change, what to include, and what to outright excise (that late scene with the Losers Club in the sewers and Bev's solution to get out...that should get excised and I don't think I want to know anyone who argues otherwise).

All of the choices are subjective, of course. I think I could make the case for not including Pennywise the Clown (not a decision I would make should I be suddenly granted the money and opportunity to make another adaptation), so you have to take a step back and look at the large choices to be made. The book is filled with large (and many, many small) things, so what do you keep? What do you highlight? What do you downplay?

Well, I have my own preferences, and they start with the book's structure. On the grand scale, the structure jumping back and forth between the two time periods is easily the best thing in the whole book. It creates this path of discovery for the audience that mirrors the main characters in both timelines (the execution is often clunky and unnatural, especially transitioning from one to the next, but it overall works very well), and it provides framing for the adults that that half of the story desperately needs (the adults really don't do much in the book until the finale). I would like to see that built into any adaptation.

Another really good thing in the book is the relationships between the kids. Aside from Mike, who's introduced to the Losers Club shockingly late, the kids feel like...kids interacting with each other and facing down something bigger than them. There's a genuine aspect to them that goes beyond the often poorly written dialogue from King. The secret to King's success is always his characters, and IT is a good example of that.

I also find the history of Derry to be interesting, Mike's research tracing back in time the different awful history of the town that is Its bloody trail, mostly told through oral histories he picks up from the older members of the town. It's not something that's easy to dramatize, working better in a literary form than a cinematic one, but it's something I'd want to see in an adaptation.

However, talking about good things, one must also mention the bad things. As previously mentioned, the dialogue is generally not good. No need to keep that for the sake of loyalty to the source. Stan is largely a non-character. The adults don't have a lot to do. Both adult and child sections have long stretches that are little more than loosely connected horror vignettes that end with the characters involved getting away. Having that happen repeatedly makes the monster chasing them far less scary, no matter how gross the vignettes can get (emblematic of King's tendency to just write in circles until he eventually found something like a point). The ending is a disappointment with the Lovecraftian terror that is IT ultimately just being a big spider. Also...getting out of the sewers is just...wrong.

So, in terms of adaptation, there's a lot to sort through. What choices did the two make?

Television

The biggest thing that television series tries to port from the book is the structure. Well, sort of. The television series works best in the first hour or so when it does do the jumping back and forth from the adults to their memories as children. However, because the television movie was broken into two parts to play over two nights, the first one has to end with a climax and denouement, so Wallace chose to show how the children defeated the eponymous monster at the end of the first episode. One of the points in the book where the cross-cutting of timelines works best is when King is cross-cutting during the competing confrontations with It across the two timelines. It's a tense way to deliver the information on the two events as they feed into each other with, essentially, different characters going through the same space at different times. It works really well. Isolating the child and adult confrontations with It robs the two events of that supplementary quality.

Regarding structure, that decision also makes the second episode...really weird. The children's story is finished, but the adults are still digging up memories and marching towards their own confrontation with It. So, that means that we're getting a bunch of memories, like Bev's moment with the blood in the bathroom sink, well after we've watched the kids defeat It. The decision is very bizarre, and it deflates the second half even more than the overall focus on the adults who are generally not that interesting and don't do much but wander around, experience horror vignettes, and eventually find their way into the sewers. Highlighting the adult section by letting it stand on its own is a mistake.

The medium of network television also prevented Wallace from getting too deep into the horror that King described in often vivid detail, so things like Richie facing the werewolf end up feeling a bit tame. Scary enough for network television, but not much else. This isn't helped at all by the rather cheap budget and short filming time which creates a very flat visual look to almost everything, death to most horror. It ends up being a fairly literal adaptation, making few major changes, condensing heavily, trying to keep focus on the characters, and eliminating the vast majority of small side characters that King populated the book with.

Being fairly literal, though, it retains a lot of what makes the book frustrating to me, namely the feeling of random vignettes in a row. Kid/adult encounters It. Kid/adult gets scared. Kid/adult runs away without getting touched. I think it works slightly better here, though, because it just doesn't take as long as in the book which is two separate sections of a solid 100 pages each that does the same thing that the series does in a few minutes. It also retains King's disappointing ending where he reveals It in Its full form, and it's a giant spider. I mean, King spends a lot of time calling It this otherworldly, eternal thing, but he doesn't have the imagination to even imply some truly alien form. He settles with "the closest thing they can come up with is a giant spider" before he ends up calling it "the giant spider" for the rest of the section. So, the film just puts a giant spider in its finale. What doesn't work in the book doesn't work in the TV movie.

Overall, the TV adaptation is a very literal adaptation that makes plenty of changes to fit the story into the medium of network television movie. It makes some curious changes to the structure while trying to retain some of it, but ultimately it's a safe work that retains more issues from the book than tries to fix them.

Feature Film(s)

The assortment of production companies (including New Line Cinema, who funded a three-part adaptation of The Lord of the Rings before the first one was even fully written) would only fund an adaptation of IT one at a time. So, they made the first part, released it, took in the cash, and then greenlit the second part. So, this led to major structural changes, especially in the first part, and I think it requires treating to two separately to some degree.

Chapter One


The biggest choice that Andy Muschietti made regarding the adaptation is keeping the children's story wholly contained in the first part. If one were to split the original novel into two halves, between the tales of children and adults, it's the children's story that works best independently. The adult section is so intimately tied to the children's section, King playing (not entirely successfully) with the idea of memory in the adult section that it cannot stand alone. The children's section is fodder for its own telling, and that's what Muschietti does.

The biggest difference between the feature film's treatment of the material and the television adaptation of this part of the book is the overall approach to cinematic storytelling. The TV adaptation feels like a book adaptation. The feature film feels like a movie. It still retains much of the issues with the book, but scenes aren't quite as choppily put together, and the whole thing actually looks like a movie instead of a cheap TV production. I mean...I appreciate that. There's also this effort to make the series of horror vignettes feel more impactful and spread out rather than in a row, like the adaptation largely maintained. It ends up retaining a lot of the events of the film like Eddie encountering the Leper, for instance, but because they're spread out and spaced out better than the book, it's less obvious that it's just a series of close calls. It's interesting, though, that there's no werewolf. It's very prominent in the book, and even the TV adaptation included it.

And the werewolf isn't in it because Pennywise the Clown gets far more attention than even the book gives it. Pennywise is the most prominent form of It in the book, but he's far from a majority. He's more like a prominent plurality. The rest is largely dedicated to the Mummy and the Werewolf with a smattering of other things all over the place (like the insane bully's dead friends guiding him in the adult section), but the most prominent scene of It with the group of kids outside the finale has It being in the form of the werewolf (when they all go to the rundown house). This means that It is in only one form when it scares the children: a clown.

The Pennywise shape is explicitly done to lure kids in close to then feed on them. And then, the film has him be a source of terror in that form too. It's both, but those are mutually exclusive things. That leads to these amped up terror moments when Pennywise shuffles forward fast with his head jerking about as the only way to scare things. And that's kind of how the whole film approaches horror: big and obvious. There's no tension. It's mostly just big scary noises. It's more of a general approach to horror in film in the 2010s, but it's a difference in adaptation from the source. It's something that irks me, not because it's different, but because that type of horror is not scary, I don't think.

Another change is that they give the kids a more personal motive to go into the sewers to face It in the form of It kidnapping Bev. They have to come back together after a fight (not in the books) to save their best friend, and it even gives us a moment where It demonstrates why he scares kids instead of how King does it: giving It a handful of chapters late where It essentially explains itself.

In terms of adaptation, I think Chapter One is the best of the three. Not the most faithful, but the one that does the job best of moving the story from one medium to the next.

Chapter Two


And...then we get to the adult section. The adult section in the book is just not that robust. The adults receive the calls from Mike. They leave their lives to go to Derry (or not, in Stan's case). They meet at the Chinese restaurant and bond again. And then Mike...has them wander Derry for an afternoon to recover more memories, or something, which leads to the horror vignettes. Afterwards, they meet at the library, talk some more, one gets attacked by the old bully Henry Bowers, and they have to go down to the sewers two short instead of at full power with seven. For half of a 1200 page book, it's not a lot of story.

A nearly 3-hour movie about this is going to go very thin, and Muschietti made the choice to do what the TV adaptation did: input childhood memories into the story when the childhood section is already complete. This time they invent things not in the book, though, which is...whatever. It's nice to see the clubhouse appear, I guess. This really feels like an attempt to pump up runtime so that the producers could call the finished product "epic".

Anyway, the film actually moves through the reunion pretty quickly, and leaving us with a lot of time to focus on the dispersal across Derry. However, Muschietti comes up with an actual reason: The Ritual of Chud. The Ritual of Chud was in the book, but it was more about locking eyes with It and making it laugh, a facade for facing down this thing of fear and making it clear that you're not afraid of it. The film introduces busyness to collect mementos from the adults' childhood to burn in an old Native American urn for reasons. I mean...it's really just a fetch quest of dubious use, but it's something other than, "Just go, we'll meet up later."

That does create the series of vignettes again, and it's where the film suffers the most. The reappearance of the kids' storylines ends up creating new events where the kids faced off with It, and they're aligned with the adults' encounters. So, we're getting double encounters with It where we know that the people will survive...for more than an hour. It drags. The movie drags badly.

The confrontation with It in the end is much, much longer in the film than it is in the book, with each adult going into hallucinations from their past with Pennywise taunting them. At least Muschietti was determined to not just do a giant spider. We do get Pennywise's head on a giant spider with a heavier emphasis on the Dead Lights (from the book, but also present in the first feature film) that implies It being something bigger and more menacing than just a scary monster. I mean, the whole third act drags out way too long, but at least there's a real attempt at making the spider a mask for something more, though King's own description was that the spider form was It unmasked.

Choices


I've gone long, so let's wrap this up...

It used to be that film was seen as this idealized form for a story in popular culture, that every great book needed to become a movie. That has shifted over the past decade or so where everyone wants their favorite book to be a long miniseries like Game of Thrones. And yet...imagine Jaws as a 10 part miniseries instead of the tight 2-hour film that Spielberg put out in the 70s.

Anyway, my point is that IT doesn't need a 25-hour adaptation on Prime, or whatever. It needs, at most, 5-6 hours. You don't need to spend pages of the pseudo-intellectualizing by 10-year old characters. You don't need the series of repetitive horror vignettes. Heck, I don't think you need all of the characters (Stan, in particular, could get cut pretty easily, and I think there's an argument for combining Mike and Ben).

That being said, the two adaptations, purely from the angle of the task of adaptation, are not bad. They retain the core of the book (the kids and their relationships). They retain a lot of events from the book. They ultimately feel like they belong in their own medium instead of being awkward attempts in the wrong one (this is how I view Pet Semetary). The most loyal would be the television adaptation. The best of them is probably Chapter One (though I don't think I'd quite call it good). The most improved is honestly Chapter Two because the adult section of the book is such a wet fart for a long stretch, and at least the ending of the movie works decently.

They all make choices. They all change things. Some big things get changed a whole lot. A whole host of smaller things get changed (Ben being the historian of Derry instead of Mike feels like a crime against Mike). The choices are subjective. The source is flawed. The flaws come through. Some are fixed sometimes, but they're often just left along, translated into the new medium uncritically.

Anyway, I'm done. That's enough. It was an interesting thought experiment. I think the end result is as messy and cluttered as King's original novel.

Sorry about that.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Sonic the Hedgehog 3

Mufasa: The Lion King

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

The Incredible Shrinking Woman (Rating 1.5/4) Full Review "Anyway, it's generally not that funny. The plot doesn't really work. The special effects and production design are really good." [Library]

D.C. Cab (Rating 0.5/4) Full Review "He ends up creating this slog of a film that never comes together, never entertains, and never engages." [Library]

St. Elmo's Fire (Rating 1/4) Full Review "Joel Schumacher really wanted to be the Robert Altman for Gen-X, didn't he?" [Library]

The Lost Boys (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "I mean, I sort of get its enduring appeal. It's pretty fun, but it's also frustrating at the same time." [Library]

Flatliners (Rating 2/4) Full Review "So, I didn't hate it, despite my long list of narrative grievances targeted at its script. Schumacher is a largely unimaginative director, unable to take the material from Filardi and take it in a direction more interesting, but he makes the most of what's on the page." [Library]

Dying Young (Rating 0.5/4) Full Review "This movie is trash. It was approached poorly by Schumacher and then fixed badly by him after test screenings." [Library]

Batman Forever (Rating 0.5/4) Full Review "So, no, I don't like this movie at all. It's really bad. I do appreciate the visual look of the film, which is pretty consistently interesting, but it's far from enough to get me through even singular scenes much less the whole thing. Really, this is the worst Batman live-action film." [Personal Collection]

Batman & Robin (Rating 1.5/4) Full Review "Is this fun? Some childish part of me doesn't hate it, but it's poorly written, poorly performed, and kind of dumb. It might be some of the closest I get to ironically enjoying a film because I don't enjoy it." [Personal Collection]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 1/11, and it will be about the directed works of Joel Schumacher.