I didn't like this, unfortunately (spoilers)

Heh, followed in the footsteps of the miniseries where Part 2 also failed hard. Still worth seeing though as closure for those that saw the first It. A pity it couldn't be better if not equal to the first. Seeing it on Friday.

Yep, this sucked

I mostly agree, although I'd not call the first film uneven. It's among the best horror films I've ever seen. The sequel plodded along until the final act, and only the scenes of the Losers as children were interesting. Somehow, the adults never clicked for me, though Bill Hader was excellent and James McAvoy was remarkably good as well. I knew I'd seen him before, but didn't recognize him as the lead from Split until about halfway through the film, which is a testimony to his skill as an actor.

I found the old lady the scariest thing. You think an old lady is as safe as it gets and when you realise she's evil that was scary. Even her giant form was scary to me.

The Lumberjack scene wasn't scary. It was CGI and I found the boy's CGI'ed face scarier than anything else. Deageing teen boys is obvious a nascent technology.

"Even though it was uneven, I enjoyed the first film ... but 'It Chapter Two' was horribly written by Gary Dauberman, who also wrote 'Annabelle', 'Annabelle: Creation', 'The Nun', and 'Annabelle Comes Home'. Dauberman was one of several writers who contributed to the script of 'It', but he's the sole writer on the sequel ... and it shows."

Does it? I thought he did fine.

"'It Chapter Two' has too much comedy (like Eddie cracking jokes as he's stabbed in the mouth by Henry Bowers) and no genuine scares (unless you find people running from goofy CGI creations scary). There is a ton of blunt and expository dialogue, as well as cumbersome flashbacks to the first film, lumped in with even more flashbacks to events we never got to see that occurred during the timeframe of the first 'It' (something to do with the dodgy memories of the Loser's Club). They even throw in an animated flashback, like the opening of 'Black Panther', showing how It arrived on a meteorite and how Native American magic (?) can defeat it."

I think Eddie was more in shock at that moment, not knowing who this guy even was who just attacked him - don't forget, their memories were buried deep down.

If the CGI creatures are "goofy" to you, then they're certainly not to the victims, as It takes the form of their deepest fears, however absurd they may look to us. It's like the Chinese restaurant manager looking on as Ben (?) smashes up one of her tables for no reason she can see.

I loved the flashbacks the Losers had: it showed that Pennywise attacked them a lot more than we saw before (and possibly why they eventually overcame their fears, before the mass amnesia made the terrors scary again for them).

In the book, IT DID arrive on a flaming meteorite a million years ago, and the Losers did engage in a Native American "smoke hole" ritual to see this vision, so it's not all out of left field.