#none of mikes canon trauma is ever acknowledged? hes just shit on

[qprstobin]

I think some of y'all don't know how to make Mike sympathetic or redeemable or whatever without turning his trauma into internalized homophobia. Like the kid has had SOOO much shit happen to him/in front of him and yet every fic has him basically being a brat bc he can't handle his feelings for Will. He's a traumatized kid he's allowed to be a bit of dick honestly without automatically turning it into a shipping thing

[rose-tylers]

So, I saw IT today. Ramblings behind a read more, including spoilers and book-to-movie things. Probably don’t read if you haven’t read the book, or just really loved the movie (I didn’t hate it, but a lot of the changes bugged me, most of which I talk about here.)

If you don’t already know, IT is probably my all-time favorite book. I love the story, I usually read it at least once a year (in fact, I’m strongly considering another reread now), I used to be obsessed with the miniseries until I read the book (I still enjoy the miniseries, but it definitely doesn’t hold up as well after reading the book, though it holds up a bit better than the movie...).

I’ve been waiting for what feels like forever for them to make a proper movie version of IT, and while I know any movie version could never fully convey the depth and epicness of the book, I looked forward to at least the spirit.

The movie version of IT takes a lot of liberties with the story (most notably changing the time period from the 1958 to 1989 for the bulk of the kids’ part of the story, while the second half with the adults will take place in the present day, as opposed to 1985), but the spirit is mostly still there. Pennywise/It was also fucking TERRIFYING, much more so than It seemed in the book, and was in the miniseries (though Tim Curry definitely made a very scary Pennywise); with the magic of modern film and special effects, we get to see Pennywise take on all sorts of frightening physical changes, and become literally larger-than-life in some scenes.

On its own, the movie was great, and solid, but as a lover of the book, I can’t help feeling a bit of a disconnect, and wishing some things hadn’t been changed.

My biggest problem was Mike Hanlon’s character. In the book, he’s the only black kid in Derry, and he and his parents live on a farm outside of town, so he goes to a different school than the other kids, and doesn’t see them very much until the fateful rock fight. His parents are both devoted and loving, and want nothing more than to give Mike a good life. Mike is also the “keeper” of Derry’s history, through stories and clippings saved and given to him by his father, and he’s the one who fills in the rest of the Losers on the town’s history; this is his role in the group, as their historian. In this movie, his parents are dead (unnecessarily, in my opinion), killed in a house fire when Mike was a little boy, and he’s now being raised by his grandfather, who is not a very kind or patient man (in the beginning of the movie, Mike is hesitant to kill a sheep with a gun, though we see later, after the group’s encounter in the house on Neibolt Street, that he has been able to overcome this hesitation to do what his grandfather asks of him). Most notably, the role of the group’s “historian” is given to Ben, for reasons I can’t quite understand, and it makes Mike superfluous. He doesn’t really get to do much of anything. In the second encounter with It in the house on Neibolt Street, he brings the gun he uses to kill the sheep, but wastes one bullet during his fight with Henry Bowers, and loses the rest of the ammo down the well after loading the gun with one more bullet, and then Bill takes the gun and ultimately uses it to harm IT.

There are small references to the book throughout the movie (Richie wears a t-shirt that says “Freese’s department store,” which is a nod to his encounter with Henry Bowers and his gang in the book, we see the giant statue of Paul Bunyon, which is Richie’s first encounter with It, there’s a brief shot of the Neibolt Street church and we hear singing coming from inside, Georgie has a Lego turtle on his bedside table, which is presumably a nod to the cosmic turtle in the book), but I feel like there’s a lot lost in translation.

For one, no mention is ever made of the power that holds the group together. There’s a glimmer of it in the first encounter in the house on Neibolt Street, when the kids are able to send Pennywise away through their combined effort as a group, but in the book, there’s a constant feeling of fate and destiny, that these kids are meant to be together, and there’s no mention of it here.

For two, in the book, each kid in the group has a clear, well-defined role. Bill is the leader; Eddie is the navigator; Bev is the sharpshooter; Ben is the architect; Mike is the historian; Stan is the reason; and Richie is the comic relief. In the movie, we see almost none of this, except for Bill’s leadership, and Richie’s jokes, and I feel like this takes away from what makes this group so special.

They also aged the kids up by about 2 years, putting them in middle/junior high school, as opposed to elementary school, which brings about a different sort of dynamic between the kids, their peers at school, and Henry Bowers.

We lose a lot of the impact of the history of Derry. It’s all mentioned; the explosion at the Ironworks, the killing of the Bradley Gang, the fire at the Black Spot, but it’s just anecdotal, and doesn’t convey the true scope of It’s power over Derry, and how long It’s actually been there.

Other changes include making Henry’s father a cop (again, another change that feels unnecessary, and also takes away a large part of why Henry hates Mike so much; in the book, Henry’s father also owns a farm, which is right next to Mike’s family farm, but the Hanlon farm is much more successful and prosperous than the Bowers farm, and the Bowers’ family failure is blamed entirely on the Hanlon family; racism is definitely a factor, but it goes much deeper than that in the book, in addition to “crazy” running in the Bowers family; Henry’s father is referred to throughout the book as “crazy Butch Bowers”), though I did appreciate that Henry kills his father in the movie the same way he does in the book.

Bev also has short hair for most of the movie, while her hair is long in the book, but this is more of an acceptable change. In the book, Bev’s father’s incestuous feelings for her are very subtle, only coming to a distinct head when It “possesses” her father near the climax of the kids’ portion of the book. In the movie, it is much clearer that he has some not-so-fatherly feelings towards his daughter, and may actually be molesting her, if not outright already raping her. Bev has long hair at the beginning of the movie, but cuts it short after an early scene with her father, where he asks, “Are you still my girl?” and touches her hair and face; Bev cutting her hair off is a clear trauma response, and a perfectly acceptable shift from the book canon. (A curious change that happened in both the miniseries and this movie is the removal of Bev’s mother as a character; she’s not as influential in Bev’s life and overall arc as her father is, but she’s still present in the book, and I hoped she would still at least exist in the movie, even just sort of in passing.)

Another thing that sort of bothered me, and that I didn’t see a purpose in doing, was having It steal Georgie’s body after ripping his arm off, causing Georgie to be another “missing” kid. In the book, It rips his arm off, and Georgie’s screams alert several neighbors, who come running, though Georgie is already dead by the time the first person reaches him. It just felt... strange to me to have him be presumed “missing,” and to have Bill think that he could still be alive, rather than just having Georgie be outright dead.

The inclusion of Patrick Hockstetter seemed pointless, given that they didn’t even reference his original arc in the book, which was honestly one of the more disturbing and creepy subplots of the book. Additionally, Henry’s friends Belch Huggins and Victor Criss were much more important figures in the book, and here they were nothing more than background characters to back up Henry’s bullying.

The epicness of the group’s trip down to the sewers, and their ultimate fight with Pennywise, also felt a bit... lacking. They basically just beat the shit out of him and sent him retreating back into the sewers, and while it was satisfying, it lacked the grandness and epicness of the fight in the book.

There were a lot of things I enjoyed, though. Ben’s love of New Kids on the Block was cute, and I liked that Bev knew about it, but didn’t tease him for it, and kept it from the others, who probably would have teased him for it. I liked the soft acknowledgment of Ben’s crush on Bev, and Bev’s crush on Bill; Bev kissing Bill at the end, while not in the book, felt true to these characters as they were presented in the movie. The scene of the kids playing in the water was also cute, and felt like one of the few “real kid” moments in the movie. I’m glad they included the house on Neibolt Street; the scenes in the house in the book are the most terrifying, and here they were as well, even if the contents of the scenes were changed entirely for the movie. We didn’t see a lot of It’s different forms that were used to scare the kids (like Richie’s werewolf, or Ben’s mummy, or Mike’s bird), but Eddie’s leper was horrifying, as was Stan’s creepy lady in the painting (even though that wasn’t It’s form for Stan in the book).

Ultimately, I know I won’t be fully satisfied with any visual retelling of the book unless it’s a many-hours long miniseries for SciFi or something, but I did enjoy the movie, so long as I keep it largely separate from the book in my mind.