It (Muschietti, 2017) Movie • Page 29

They treated Mike so terribly. I will never understand why they ruined his story and threw him to the side so much. He better have a huge story in the second part.

 

in the book, Mike is the one who spends a lot of time at the library and discovers a lot of the town history stuff.

after the childhood events, he's the only one that stays in Derry, remembers what happened, and calls everyone to come back and face Pennywise again

 

He’s also the only child with a really beautiful and healthy home life (Richie’s is fine but it doesn’t come up much), so the fact that they made his parents dead and his grandfather cruel really took away from his character.

 

Trying to be fair to the filmmakers, the only good explanation I can come up with is that, seeing as how they very obviously made the choice to downplay and basically remove any racial aspect of the hatred directed towards Mike's character, they knew it played kind of stupid to have these violently hateful evil white people yelling things like ''go away, uhm, ahhh outsider! get out of my town!" to the black character. At some point the decision was made to not go there with regard to the racism aspect of the hatred, but the alternative they came up with plays pretty silly and generic. Maybe they realized it didn't work well but late in the process and just trimmed his scenes down as a result.

I'm not saying I think this was a good idea or anything, it's just all I can come up with. It's as if they were so afraid of their horror movie featuring anyone on screen saying racist words that they went and did the pretty problematic thing of gutting the black character's significance and giving all of the crucially important stuff he does in the narrative to one of the white characters.

I only read the book once and it was many years ago but I remember as I was reading it feeling like the evil and hatred in the story just radiated up off the page. It was almost palpable. It was disappointing to me to see that aspect of the story completely defanged for this film version, especially in a movie where they weren't afraid to show a child being brutally murdered on screen.

 

Totally agree. They did the same thing with the damsel in distress plot for Bev which was super unnecessary and took away from her role in the group. I still loved it but some of those decisions will always bother me.

The racism in the book was one of the more brilliantly written points to me. It brought the evil of Derry into the real world and showed how the facade of it being a “good” place would always fail for those who are really considered outsiders. Mike’s dad didn’t have the luxury of hiding his head in the sand like the other adults because it could destroy his family. Plus the fact that Mike had a good family who loved each other and was relatively successful but still had to fight for everything and was considered a “loser” just because of his race was so heartbreaking. So many great scenes in the book are just him and his dad interacting and it’s not like they can remedy it by flashbacks since they’ve been dead a long time in the first part.

 

Exactly. For the most part, nobody is really ''pro" completely unhinged violent psychopath. Actual racism and homophobia and such things are so much more insidious and dangerous and I think, at the end of the day, just plain more scary than the crazed violence loving psychopath angle.

If everyone in Derry started becoming violent psychopathic killers would it still be considered an idyllic New England town and a great place to live...? But if something like racism or homophobia festers below the surface but grows and is stoked and in turn fed on by an entity of pure evil from beyond this plane of existence, that's a different and scarier ballgame.

I am not one to say that books are always and inherently better than movies, and I enjoyed IT (2017) quite a bit and consider it a good movie, but I think it's a shame that on a story and writing level they whiffed on so much of what made the book scary. The movie kinda plays like you read the book and your main takeaway was "HOLY CRAP THAT KILLER CLOWN WAS SCARY" and missed so much else of what was going on.