OK, I finally saw IT over the week I was in Iowa with my friends. (the weather was so damned hot that we actually saw 4 movies to replace some of the outdoor stuff that we had planned).
I've wanted to see it since it first came out, but I was worried that it was, like a lot of adaptations of King's books, going to suck.
Boy was I wrong. It was absolutely fantastic.
It stayed pretty true to the book in most important aspects. As expected, a number of the kids aren't as fully developed as characters as they are in the book, but that's the nature of these ensemble movies.
They moved the timeline up from the 1960s to the mid to late 1980s, and there were a number of places where I thought that that didn't work all that well, but it wasn't a huge distraction. They also added some minor antagonist characters (bitchy daughter of the local pharmacist) that really did nothing for the story.
Overall, though, the casting was really good -- the kids they got to play the Losers worked incredibly well together, and they guy who played the Pennywise was perfect. The kid who played the main human antagonist, Henry Bower, played the role of the sadistic bully with severe repressed mental issues that started coming out as the movie moved along absolutely perfectly.
The tension points throughout the movie were masterful, and a couple were actually quite frightening. In one that gave me chills a decapitated, smoking child in early 1900s Sunday clothing chases the one character through the stacks at the local public library.
I'm really surprised that it's only gotten 7.5 of 10 on IMDB.