It (2017)
Directed by Andy Muschietti
In a small town in Maine, seven children known as The Losers Club come face to face with life problems, bullies and a monster that takes the shape of a clown called Pennywise.
79 connections found
View:
79 films that influenced It
What critics say influenced It
The way the movie is filmed and the way the young characters humorously interact intentionally replicates the look and feel of '80s Steven Spielberg directed/produced movies like E.T. and, especially, The Goonies.
Especially if it falls into that brief window between, say, E.T. and The Goonies.
“It” is set in the summer of 1989, with “A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5” playing at the local cinema of Derry, Maine, and it very deliberately recalls “The Goonies” — one kid even carries an asthma inhaler– and “Stand by Me” (also based on a King story).
It's a messy mix of Nightmare on Elm Street meets The Goonies and that isn't a compliment.
Although definitely a step up in most regards (aside from an exceptionally key one) from the TV adaptation, this version proves to be a wildly uneven work that at times genuinely seems like the horror classic that it wants to be and other times comes across as little more than “The Goonies” with a significantly higher body count.
It has a vintage retro, throwback feel that recalls several other touchstone movies of its 1980s era, notably Stand By Me (adapted from another Stephen King story) and The Goonies .
Mike, in a possible homage to black filmmaker Charles Burnett’s brilliant film Killer of Sheep , is forced to stun sheep using a bolt gun while his uncle informs him that he has to learn to wield the weapon or else it will be wielded against him.
That's not to say the scares aren't fun, because they are: Pennywise the evil shape-shifting clown basically has Freddy Krueger-like powers to shape reality into nightmares, a connection you'd fully expect the kids to make sooner given that A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 is actually playing at their local movie theater ('80s references replace the '50s touchstones from the novel, given how long it's been, though they can't beat the even more subtle nods to cinematic cult classics like Killer of Sheep and The Wicker Man ).
With the setting upgraded from the ’50s to the ’80s, with “Gremlins” posters adorning bedroom walls and New Kids on the Block references bleeding into the soundtrack, “It” doesn’t just take place in the confines of a novel written during King’s peak creative output; it may as well have been made then.
Mix one part vulgar innocence (these kids swear up a storm, even if they don't know what exactly they're talking about), add a breezy layer of cultural benchmarks ( Gremlins and A Nightmare on Elm Street posters adorn the scenery's fringes) and mix it all in a rusty blender on high in the middle of an abandoned corn field.
A poster for the Spielberg-produced Gremlins can briefly be seen above one character’s bed, and its blend of bloody horror, comedy and sympathetic youths in peril is the sort of movie that the best of Muschietti’s It feels in debt to.
This means that all the Eisenhower-era references have been replaced with Reagan/Bush Sr.-era references—the local movie theater is showing Batman and Lethal Weapon 2, one of the characters has a Gremlins poster on his bedroom wall, and another character tries desperately to hide his admiration for the New Kids on the Block.
Ambientada em 1989, a narrativa segue os passos de Super 8 e Stranger Things (que também trazia o divertido Wolfhard no elenco) ao explorar a nostalgia da década de 80 através das canções e de referências a títulos como Gremlins e Os Fantasmas se Divertem , não deixando de homenagear, claro, o cineasta que se tornou ícone do período: Steven Spielberg.
This is a self-reflexively cine-literate world, in which posters for Gremlins and Beetlejuice hang on children’s walls, and the gateway to the monster’s lair resembles Norman Bates’s home from Psycho .
Mix one part vulgar innocence (these kids swear up a storm, even if they don't know what exactly they're talking about), add a breezy layer of cultural benchmarks (Gremlins and A Nightmare on Elm Street posters adorn the scenery's fringes) and mix it all in a rusty blender on high in the middle of an abandoned corn field.
Now Andy Muschietti uses a movie marquee to tell you that while you might be thinking of his version of Stephen King’s “It” as a scarier version of “Stand by Me” or even “The Goonies,” you should really consider “A Nightmare on Elm Street” as its progenitor.
"It" recalls "Stand by Me," "E.T.," "Carrie," "Alien" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street," among others.
It’s reminiscent of the paranoia of being awake or asleep in A Nightmare on Elm Street , but it lacks the inventiveness of Wes Craven’s film.
…her Carrie-like anxieties manifest in a bloody eruption that owes less to the lift sequence from The Shining than to Johnny Depp’s demise in A Nightmare on Elm Street .
“It” may be based on a 1986 novel by the American literary phenomenon known as Stephen King, but it features tropes from two other 1980s icons, “The Goonies” (1985), which was co-written by Steven Spielberg, and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (1984), a film by late writer-director Wes Craven.
Advertisement
The way the movie is filmed and the way the young characters humorously interact intentionally replicates the look and feel of '80s Steven Spielberg directed/produced movies like E.T. and, especially, The Goonies.
Especially if it falls into that brief window between, say, E.T. and The Goonies.
It’s like someone threw The Goonies and Stand by Me and The Lost Boys and Poltergeist in a blender with a smidge of E.T. and a pinch of John Hughes to make an 80s smoothie.
"It" recalls "Stand by Me," "E.T.," "Carrie," "Alien" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street," among others.
It's "Back to the Future" and "E.T." and "The Breakfast Club," Robert Zemeckis' small-town dramas and Steven Spielberg's suburban dreams and John Hughes' angsty adolescents.
The gang has a real sense of camaraderie; they feel like a group of real kids and you buy into their world, the same way you buy into the “Stranger Things” group, or the “Stand by Me” kids or the children in “E.T.” (It’s a sense of wonder that J.J. Abrams wanted to tap into but couldn’t quite nail in “Super 8.”) The kids are right in that zone of innocence where they’re young enough to start developing feelings for the opposite sex but don’t yet know what to do about it — there’s a great scene where the boys all stare agape at Beverly while she lies out in the sun in her underwear — and the story is set long enough ago that it has a sense of nostalgia about it.
Each member of the Losers Club encounters Pennywise in a different form corresponding to their individual fears, from Beverly’s “Carrie”-like encounter with blood bursting from a sinkhole to the gooey leper that chases Eddie through a yard, and these encounters stand out as masterstrokes of cinematic shock effects.
While the film sometimes uses suspense as a tool, it more often dives head-first into dramatizing King’s grislier flights of fancy, from a child’s arm being ripped off to a fountain of blood that puts the bucket in Carrie to shame.
…features the kind of perceptive storytelling about teenagers that turned King adaptations such as Carrie and Stand By Me into classics.
His horror-related films have been of variable quality, with the best two being (arguably) The Shining (King would disagree) and Carrie.
It's a gamble so many writers and directors have taken with a few ("Salem's Lot," "Carrie," "Misery") proving to be winners.
It wants to be a cultural movement, The Shining, Carrie or Misery of its time, all films based on Stephen King novels.
In a considerable step up for Mama director Andy Muschietti, It assembles a clown car full of effective elements: horrific imagery aplenty, the skills to make it stick, and the smarts to show that supernatural bogeymen and real-life bullies aren't all that different.
So the new adaptation, directed by Andy Muschietti (2013’s Mama ), is in that rare category of remakes that actually have a mission — to do more justice to the source material, to just be a better movie in general.
But after a summer that has been positively terrifying for King fans for all the wrong reasons — with the “Dark Tower” firing blanks on the big screen and “The Mist” leaving television viewers in a fog — aficionados will find much to enjoy in the savvy take on the classic horror novel by director Andy Muschietti (“Mama”).
Director Andy Muschietti (Mama) makes a very crucial decision in his visualization of It.
Director Andy Muschietti (Mama) knows when to make a camera linger, or when to insert something into the background before the characters are aware of it.
Despite the obvious care and attention paid to the horror elements by director Andy Muschietti (Mama), the scenes in question can't help but start to feel like a succession of conceptual set pieces rather than natural extensions of the story.
It's the horror film version of "Stand by Me," a nostalgic tale of seven bullied kids who stand up to the evil force that shows up every 27 years to engineer a slew of deaths and people missing - 102 gone over the years, 88 of them children.
There’s more than a whiff of Stand by Me about the newer movie, not only because of thematic similarities between that film’s source material and It, but also thanks to Muschietti’s killer cast—a deft collection of teenaged talents that seem destined to break big à la Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O’Connell.
…features the kind of perceptive storytelling about teenagers that turned King adaptations such as Carrie and Stand By Me into classics.
Longtime friend and former Bullz-Eye contributor Will Harris said that there is a fair amount of “Stand by Me” DNA in “It,” and damned if he isn’t dead on the money.
King fans will note that the best movie adaptations of the writer’s work have been his non-horror stories: Stand by Me , The Shawshank Redemption , Misery, The Green Mile.
(“It” may not rival “Stand By Me,” but that movie is clearly an inspiration.)
Advertisement
A drugstore heist or a swim at the quarry could easily have been lifted from any coming-of-age movie, like “The Sandlot” or “The Kings of Summer.”
The performances really help elevate “It” in to a coming of age film in the vein of “Stand By Me,” and “The Sandlot,” as the entire young cast are absolutely fantastic.
Chase Palmer and Cary Fukunaga‘s screenplay carves out colorful and relatable characters that feel like an eclectic mix of those in “Stranger Things” and The Sandlot.
The remainder of the late-1980s-set film works best as a period comedy, with sassy one-liners reminiscent of "Stand by Me" and "The Sandlot."
As far as decades-later invocations of this era go, the Losers Club group dynamic is funnier and less of a pastiche than the Stranger Things kids — if not quite as hilarious and endearing as the Super 8 kids.
The gang has a real sense of camaraderie; they feel like a group of real kids and you buy into their world, the same way you buy into the “Stranger Things” group, or the “Stand by Me” kids or the children in “E.T.” (It’s a sense of wonder that J.J. Abrams wanted to tap into but couldn’t quite nail in “Super 8.”) The kids are right in that zone of innocence where they’re young enough to start developing feelings for the opposite sex but don’t yet know what to do about it — there’s a great scene where the boys all stare agape at Beverly while she lies out in the sun in her underwear — and the story is set long enough ago that it has a sense of nostalgia about it.
The obvious comparison is Stand by Me, but the witty bickering and desire to save their town from sure devastation is more akin to J.J. Abrams’ Super 8 .
Ambientada em 1989, a narrativa segue os passos de Super 8 e Stranger Things (que também trazia o divertido Wolfhard no elenco) ao explorar a nostalgia da década de 80 através das canções e de referências a títulos como Gremlins e Os Fantasmas se Divertem , não deixando de homenagear, claro, o cineasta que se tornou ícone do período: Steven Spielberg.