As much of a fan of the works of Stephen King as I am, I have never actually read any of The Dark Tower. Well, I read about a third of the first book back when I was about 15, but it never really grabbed me and so I probably went back to re-reading The Stand for the umpteenth time or something. So once again, I've gone into this movie more or less blind - relying on my brother to fill in any and all blanks for me from asking him endless questions about the series while drafting this review in my head.
Jake Chambers is your typical troubled 11-year-old movie protagonist. He has visions of another world, and a dark tower (natch) and a Man in Black (not Johnny Cash) who wants to destroy the tower. The Man's attacks on the tower seem to coincide with earthquakes that happen in Jake's world, but everyone just thinks that Jake is suffering trauma from the death of his father a year previously. He manages to find that a house from one of his dreams actually exists in New York, however, and goes there, finding a portal device which takes him to Midworld - the place from his dreams. There, Jake also meets Roland, the last Gunslinger, who is on a mission to kill the Man in Black before he is able to destroy the Dark Tower and this allow the 'darkness' to destroy all of reality. Jake also finds that he has powerful psychic abilities - his 'shine', as they call it - makes him of great interest to the Man in Black, and so he and Roland set off on a quest to stop him and save all of reality.
The Dark Tower had been in and out of development hell for about 10 years before its release this year, which rarely bodes well for a film. It wasn't until 2015 that this final version of the film got off the ground. As I've mentioned before with regard to other films, the longer it takes for a film to come out and the more hyped it gets, the more likely it is that people are going to be inevitably disappointed when it finally does come out. And such was the case with The Dark Tower. It wasn't exactly a box office flop, but it was critically panned from all sides - only some of which I think was deserved.
It's a beautifully-shot film, for one thing, and Idris Elba is, of course, excellent in his role as Roland of Eld, the last Gunslinger. There was some concern when Elba was cast as Roland as to how that would affect the story of The Dark Tower, as in the books there is apparently some racial tension between Roland and a black member of his group, which of course wouldn't work if Roland was black, but in the end the filmmakers dodged that issue by just setting the movie after all the events of the novel series. Of course, that opened up a whole new can of worms and is probably one of the reasons the fans disliked it so much - and I can see their point. Waiting 10 years for a film only to discover it's an entirely new story instead of the seven beloved novels that everyone was expecting (or at least some of the novels, at least) is never going to go down well.
One of my own biggest issues with the film was how much it felt like a slightly darker version of The Never-Ending Story. It has a child protagonist who finds themselves transported to another, more fantastical world and joins in a struggle to save the world/reality from evil. The fact that they made the film PG-13/12A just hammered it home even more - it felt too much like a kids' adventure movie than one based on a dark fantasy/horror western series. And this is even stranger when you look at how desperately the film tries to make references to other Stephen King works that weren't in the book series at all. The biggest - and strangest - one is the referring to psychic abilities as 'the Shine', which never comes up in any of the Dark Tower books and is such a blatant and ham-handed attempt to link two different stories together it's painful. At the beginning of the movie, there's also a scene involving twin girls playing a game which involves them chanting, "Come and play with us..." just in case you needed another glaring reference to hit you in the face.
The Dark Tower is cluttered and trying to accomplish way too much in its 95 minutes - which is also bizarrely short when you look at the average length of other big-name or anticipated films, or at other films based on book series like The Lord of the Rings. If like me you went into it more or less blind then you might find the film enjoyable enough, but even then I think you'd see how rushed parts of the story were, how many plot holes were dug and left unattended - there's a scene near the beginning of the film where the Man in Black kills another Gunslinger, a companion of Rolands... and I didn't find out until much, much later that the dead man was actually Roland's father - and how... sanitized it felt, and all the good actors in the world can't cover up problems like that.
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