I have usually found that the sort of stories which have the first part focusing on the events surrounding an group of children or young people and the second focusing on their meeting again as adults to conclude what happened in their childhood to be of mixed qualities. For some reason, the ‘childhood’ section invariably seems to be the better and more engaging one and the adult conclusion less than satisfying. I certainly found this the case in the original version of It were, as I recall, the second part was a rather dull retreading of essentially the same story.
Here however, rather to my surprise, it was different. This second part was at least as good as the first (insofar as I can accurately remember it - I saw it in the cinema when it came out but have no recorded response). I think one significant reason was that there were a very high number of flashbacks to events and situations in the past where we saw the main characters’ young selves at the relevant points in the past that were affecting/triggering the current events we were seeing. This made the connections much more effective and emotionally powerful - and hence the whole story being more engaging. To be honest I cannot recall if the situations we saw in flashback were new or were taken from actual Part 1 events - in any case I felt that it did not matter and on a number of occasions it was made clear that the event from the past we were seeing was not one which we, as viewer had encountered in the previous episode or was a situation that was not dealt with at the time in the past when it happened. Consequently, we were able to clearly see how past and present intertwined and so became far more involved in the personal story arcs.
The setting (vintage King) was beautifully evoked (and I much enjoyed King’s cameo) BUT, and this is quite a big but, as almost all critics remarked it was vastly too long - almost three hours. It never conspicuously dragged, oddly enough, but from a structural point of view, we simply saw and experienced the same sort of series of events, with Pennywise taking a variety of gruesomely terrifying forms - but there was no real development. And ironically, the last few minutes where we saw the futures of the main characters felt rushed!
Still, pretty good and certainly involving.