Ghastly "It" remake creates only an illusion of danger

The new cinematic remake of Stephen King's terrifying 1986 horror novel, It, opens with a bloodily delicious bang: a young boy is devoured on a peaceful suburban street during a heavy downpour by the demonic clown named Pennywise (played by Bill Skarsgård). After the aforementioned evil entity bites the youngster's right arm off, he drags him into the sewer he's been occupying, the child's nearly mutilated corpse resembling a prey animal carcass that's been conquered by superior adversarial predator. It's a ghastly opening scene that will send chills down the spines of any adolescent and adult alike, and will surely stay with them for days afterwards.

Unfortunately, the movie, which runs at nearly 130 minutes, never comes close to recreating that kind of nightmarish sense of doom, as the perplexing Pennywise proceeds to mostly taunt and bark at a group of tormented and bullied upon boys, without ever actually, you know, biting anyone again. There are plenty of moments of fright, and horrifying visions of corpses and murdered children of years past, but the problem lies in the cushioned sense of safety of all the main protagonists: no meaningful character is ever in danger of actually dying, and herein lies the weakness of King's fiction when compared to that of his other successful contemporary, George R.R. Martin. Whereas the latter wont shy away from unpredictability and his indifference to breaking our hearts, King holds on too tightly to his heroes, even when they're clearly too many, and one would argue, way too superfluous to survive several encounters with Pennywise (the final scene, as greatly executed as it may be with state-of-the-art CGI, is nearly laughable in its insistence that no morally righteous character is ever actually seriously harmed; I, for one, call bullshit). 

It suffers from the same unwillingness to take chances as the other recent throwback to 1980s nostalgia, Stranger Things: the monster is only a threat to bad guys, but seldom to those we can identify with.  It's a great looking movie that inspires terror within - in many ways it evokes the dread of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street - but had it swayed away from King's original narrative, even if ever so slightly, it could've been truly great.

C