Tech Talk Thursday: Tech Reviews IT You'll float too...

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Stephen King's horror is back on the screen again, but this time as a theatrical movie.  Is it better than the T.V many series or the book?  Well, I havn't read the book, but did read the cliff notes on it, and I did watch the the T,V series when I was young so i can still say whats what, right?  Anyway on to the good, the bad and the Tech Worthy.

The Good

• The Cast

• Bill Skarsgård brings a new creepiness to Pennywise the trans-dimensional clown that feeds on scared children.
• The kids aka The Losers Club acted their butts off in this movie.  Unlike, the T.V series this movie only tells the story of them as kids and there is little focus on the adult characters. Finn Wolfhard of Stranger Things is a standout as the foul mouth quipping Richie Tozier and Sophia Lillis shined as the only female member of the loser club, Beverly "Bev" Marsh.
• The Story
• The main plot pretty much stays the same in this new movie.  A band of kids bond and come together to take down an interdenominational shape-shifting clown who needs to feed on children who are scared of him.  This time the kids are growing up in the Eighties, instead of the Fifties like the book, or the sixties like the T.V series; meaning part two of this movie will probably take place in present day to finish the story.
• Being Rated
• Poor poor Georgie, If you have seen the T.V series you know how the opening plays out with Georgie chasing his little paper boat down in the rain until it goes down the drain.  Here we just get Georgie reaching and seeminly being yanked in, but if you read the book and in the new movie poor Georgie gets his arm bit off and here we see him desperately trying to crawl away before IT shows his clawed teeth and sucks poor Georgie in.  I said oh no, they showing kids get mutaled this is going to be a different from the T.V series.

The Bad

• Michael "Mike" Hanlon going from star to token

• Ok, Mike is the only African American in the Loosers Club.  In the book and even the T.V series he had a big role, a rich back story, and was an integral part of the group.  First off Mike is the partial narrator of the book and is the only on to stay behind in the town; thus keeps his memory of IT.  He is also the historian of the group; his father had a photo album that had important moments in the the towns history; including Pennywise, and how long he had been terrorizing the town.  Here in this movie, that role went more to Benjamine. who is the new kid at school who likes to spend his time in the library and has research on the town and the killings...
• So, Mike, the key to the original story is now just a background character or dare I say token.  In the movie, he has few lines and we only see hints of the racial hate and prejudice the bully Henry had for him and don't get the backstory of their parents.  It's sad because where the novel and T.V series avoided just making him the token black character; the movie stripped him of who he was.
• Now, the director has gone on to say that Mike will be the one to still stay behind become a librarian and will keep up with the history and will be the one to call everyone back in the sequel, but he will also be a junkie.... yea... had to put that in there huh.  Looks bad, but the director says this is incorporating the seen in the book where Mike and the loosers get high off the fumes of the smokehouse and see Pennywise "origin".  Suuuuure, guess we will see where this goes in the sequel.
• Check out this article for more on how Mike was stripped of his role

The Tech Worthy

• Stephen King's shared universe
• IF you are a Stephen King fan you probably know that all of his novels exist in a shared universe thanks in part to having portals that can go to different worlds and time as present in the Dark Tower.
• In fact IT himself is a creature from outside all of the other universes.  His adversary is the Turtle and for those that know the lore know that the turtle is said to have created the universes and IT believes himself to be his opposite who consumes life where the turtle creates it.

Final Thought

All in all IT was a good horror film that calls back to a classic.