The Dark Tower SPOILER Discussion

WARNING- THIS REVIEW IS SPOILER HEAVY FOR BOTH THE BOOK SERIES AND THE FILM. IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW THE INTIMATE DETAILS OF EITHER ONE, STOP NOW. I have done a spoiler-free review of The Dark Tower film HERE, and that would be a better place to go for my thoughts on the film. If you read on, consider yourself fairly warned. Also possible language and fan-ranting, although I will try to explain myself when I do.   

To start with, I’m going to come right out and say it. This movie is fine. It’s fine. Which is good in that I’m not here going ‘it’s horrible’, but at the same time I really feel like this movie should have been a lot better than a mere ‘okay’. My first issue is the runtime. I was starting to feel not too bad about this film in the final lead up to it; I’d made my peace with the fact that this wasn’t going to be an adaptation but a continuation of the story and that this was going to be the next cycle of Roland’s quest that began with the end of the seventh book. I was willing to give it a chance to see where it was going to go. Two days before we went we checked how long the movie was to help plan things out and that’s when all those doubts came screaming back. Ninety-five minutes. That’s it. And it pissed me off, and in a weird way was almost offensive. They plan to open up this huge, expansive world that touches on basically everything Stephen King writes or has written in one way or another, and all you’ve got to do so is ninety-five minutes? This movie should have been at least two hours, easily. Then perhaps we wouldn’t have had to condense and simplify so much, and many things that were more like Easter eggs would have been better explained. Like when Walter uses Maerlyn’s Rainbow, especially Black Thirteen. If you had no idea about the series (and I have such a person to bounce these questions off of), then the importance of things like this get lost. Or the rose painted on the door at the end.

whose importance to the story is in the neighborhood of 'very fucking'

 There’s so many things that should have been more than references, things that have so much importance to the story. You don’t even hear Roland’s father called by name, which is kind of silly considering how often in the books he introduces himself as ‘Roland, son of Steven’. How hard would that have been? They managed to sneak in some Mid-World speech patterns at the village, after all. It’s just so… bare bones. I get that you don’t want to alienate non-fans, but there wasn’t really much for anyone to sink their teeth into, unless they were watching for all those little nods. And that just makes you wish they’d explained those better.  

I'll trade some of these nods for more story any day

It’s not all doom and gloom. The cast for this film is really, really good. Tom Taylor as Jake does really well. You just have to remember, this isn’t the same Jake. This is not book Jake, the kid from 1977 whose father ran a TV station. This is a Jake from presumably today, from a different Earth (in contemplating the lore, I believe book Jake couldn’t have come from Keystone Earth). But he has a lot of the qualities of the Jake we know. In the movie, they call psychic abilities ‘the Shine’ as opposed to ‘the Touch’, presumably to establish the fact that all of King’s stories are connected and that ‘the Shine’ would be familiar to people without too much explanation. As I said in my spoiler free review, I had so much fun with Matthew McConaughey’s portrayal as Walter O’Dim. I thought that was great casting and he was clearly having a lot of fun with it. I never thought he was too goofy or over the top and I really liked his menace. I would have loved to see him in some of the scenes from the book; raising Nort from the dead and the palaver with Roland at the Golgotha especially. I think those would have been fantastic with this cast. 

Speaking of the cast, I have to talk about Roland. I have no issue with his casting, I’ll get that out of the way right off the bat. When this project was first announced, I’ll admit that my dream casting was Viggo Mortensen (as Clint Eastwood is a bit too old now and Scott Eastwood isn’t quite old enough) and I thought he would have made a great Roland. But Idris Elba was fantastic, and you can’t deny that. He really does embody that character awesomely. The only problems I have with him aren’t due to Idris Elba, they’re story issues. I alluded to this problems in the spoiler-free review but now I can elaborate on them further. I may have been irritated by the short runtime and dumbing down of the story, but in a way I can understand them. What I find to be unforgivable, and maybe this is just me as a fan, is the horribly out-of-character aspects of Roland’s story. The first is Roland saying he’s not a gunslinger anymore. Excuse me? Being a gunslinger, especially as the last, is fundamental to Roland’s being. He would never deny what he was. Gunslinger isn’t just a title here, folks, it’s more than a way of life, it’s a symbol. You can see it when they meet people on their journey to the Tower. Gunslingers are almost mythical now, emblems of a time before the world moved on. For Roland to deny what he is, is to deny himself at a fundamental level and I don’t buy that. The second thing is that in the film he’s neither looking for the Man in Black or the Tower. Okay, being a gunslinger is fundamental to Roland’s being, but finding the Tower is why he gets out of bed in the morning. Finding the Man in Black is his goal the entirety of the first book. And I know, you’re going to say ‘well this is a continuation, maybe in this cycle Roland isn’t looking for these things’. Bull. Shit. If I may, let me quote The Dark Tower, the final book in the series (Coda: page 827):

'How many times had he climbed these stairs only to find himself peeled back, curved back, turned back? No to the beginning (when things might have been changed and time’s cursed lifted), but to that moment in the Mohaine Desert when he had finally understood that his thoughtless, questionless quest would ultimately succeed?' 

I took that to mean that he was always sent back to the point of no return, that he was far enough into his quest that he would no longer turn back or away from it. Why then would this version of Roland be anything other than single-mindedly looking for that which he has been looking for since he left Gilead for the last time?  And he basically says he’s abandoned his quest and that the world’s moved on and there’s nothing to be done? Book Roland would look movie Roland right in the eye and tell him he’s forgotten the face of his father. And I agree. You can throw out all the excuses about the timeline and this being a continuation, but fucking up two of the most basic parts of Roland’s personality are unforgivable to me and the biggest issues I have with this movie. Perhaps this makes me an insufferably pedantic purist, but these are crucial character elements, as important to the character of Roland as those big, sandalwood-grip guns he carries. 

I'll get off my soapbox now

Overall, despite my issues with the film, it really isn’t bad. As I said, it’s fine. But I do wish it had been better. What did I want to see, then? Basically, I wanted the story of the books on the screen, I wanted the Gunslinger’s tale done with all the love and detail that Lord of the Rings had. I wanted to see Tull, it’s people, and the battle that took place there. I wanted to hear drunken, ragtime Hey Jude and meet the farmer, Brown, and his raven Zoltan. I wanted to see the waystation and the Slow Muties under the mountains and the sacrifice of Jake. I wanted the movie to start with the opening line, hear Jake say ‘Go then. There are other worlds than these’. They even use the last part of that line as a tagline on the poster, but never in the movie.

 I ran this by my non-fan source and he took that line very differently from someone who knows the meaning behind those words. And I realize that doing a faithful adaptation of the first book probably would have pushed it close if not into an R rating, and I get that they probably didn’t want to go there. I just wanted something more from this film, and I hope if they go forward with the myriad plans they have to continue this universe, that they actually do something with it. Because you know what else I want, later on? I want Eddie and Susannah, I want the ka-tet on screen, I want to see Blaine the Mono and Lud and Shardik the cyborg bear.

Sorry, giant cyborg bear

 If you’re going to make films in this world, give us this world. There’s so much there, don’t waste it.

In the end, would I recommend this film? Yeah. It’s a good time if a simple story. Idris Elba gets to be totally badass and awesome and Matthew McConaughey gets to be slimy and evil and it’s great that way. There’s the start of something good here, we just need to bring it out and really show the amazing world that Stephen King created for these characters to inhabit. I stand by my rating of 7.5/10. Just make the next one better.  

The Dark Tower Spoiler Free Review

Well, it’s finally here. The moment of truth. The Dark Tower is here. Due to work schedules we hit up the Thursday night screening, so we got to see the very first showing in our theater. That was pretty cool in itself; me and the other half, my fellow Dark Tower nerd sister, and our elder spawn whose namesake is the main character of this series. This was a big night, and some of us were quite nervous to see how it would turn out. How could we possibly flesh out a world with such dense lore and connection to so many other things and make a satisfying movie with only 95 minutes of runtime? Well folks, that’s what we’re here to talk about today. This is a spoiler-free review and I’m going to try and keep it a little more succinct than some of my other ones. Because this is The Dark Tower though, I will also be posting a second review which will be spoiler-heavy, lore-discussing, and hardcore nerdy. I’ll link that separately. So let’s get to it. 

First off, a word to anyone who has read the books. Don’t go into this expecting a direct adaptation of that story. Even Stephen King himself has said to think of this as a continuation of the story. Anyone who has read the whole series will understand what that means. For those who haven’t, I expect it won’t make much of a difference either way. I’m just putting it out there as someone who has been reading this series so long I don’t actually remember when I started. I know I say something like that for seemingly every review, but much like Spider-Man, The Dark Tower is something very, very close to my heart at a level most fandom-things simply can’t reach. I just like to put my biases up front. 

Let’s start with the cast. A lot of people were up in arms about Idris Elba’s casting as the Gunslinger. And yes, he might not look the way Roland is described in the book. 

which is more like this

You know what though, he is damn fine in this role. He brings Roland to life. I feel that character in his mannerisms, in his speech, and how he carries himself. It is absolutely all there. As soon as I heard Matthew McConaughey’s casting as The Man in Black, I was sold. And he is just as good as I thought he’d be. He’s every bit as vicious and slimy and calculating, and almost charming as I’d hoped without becoming goofy. I didn’t know anything about Tom Taylor before this but I really enjoyed his performance as Jake Chambers. There’s a great potential for growth in his character in later installments (should they be made) and it will be interesting to see how he goes forward and if the trajectory is similar to the books, because there were hints of that. The rest of the cast does a really good job too with some familiar characters, and some new ones as well. It’s a big positive from me. The action was really fun as well, and Roland got some amazingly badass scenes where you really see the gunslingers of old come to life. 

I did also like the look of the movie a lot. When you’re combing genres like this, the way the world looks makes a big impact on that. Mid-World (Roland’s world) is post-nuclear-apocalypse in which that apocalypse was so long ago that the remnants of the people have rebuilt and anything remaining of the old world are ancient ruins, their purposes often forgotten. And it looks really cool. We do also spend time in New York, but it looks like a city so there’s not really much to say about it. I want to see more of Mid-World, and hopefully some familiar places later on down the road because this movie really does look fantastic. I would comment about the score that goes with it, but to be honest, I don’t remember anything from the score. Maybe I was too busy looking for nods to the books and other Stephen King works (of which there are several), but the score just wasn’t memorable. 

like this nod from the trailers

As I said earlier, the story doesn’t exactly follow the book(s). I’d made my peace with that, so I tried to take this film as its own thing. The story is interesting, sort of a combination of elements from the books told in a bit different way. So while that wasn’t a bad thing itself, it was really… condensed. As I said, this movie was 95 minutes. It should have been at least two hours. I hate to say it dumbed things down, but that’s kinda what it did. If they continue, I’d like to see them expand on both the lore and the world more, because it really is a fascinating thing that Stephen King created with Mid-World. I’d hate to see all that incredible story go to waste. On the flip side of that, if it had gone too deep then maybe we’d have too much of a Warcraft issue where it was too alienating of people unfamiliar with the source material. We did get some good nods and callbacks and hints along the way that set up things really well, they just need to act on that going forward. 

Okay, so the cons. I already outlined my first issue above, in that it was too short and too much of the world glossed over. There is one thing, and it would really only be a problem for fans, so take that however you will but it is my biggest issue. There are a couple of things that Roland says that I just can’t forgive. They are just so egregiously out of character. I don’t know why they decided to go that route, but if there was anything I actively disliked about this movie, it was those couple of things where Roland wasn’t Roland. Again, if you know nothing about the series, it probably wouldn’t be an issue. I’m going to do deeper into all of this in the spoiler review, if you’re interested. 

In conclusion, The Dark Tower was actually better than I feared it would be. The cast was excellent and everything looked great. I had a few story issues, but it wasn’t nearly the worst thing in the world, and I thought it was better than a lot of the buzz I’m hearing. Would I have rather seen a loving, page-for-page adaptation of the book like a sci-fi/western/fantasy Lord of the Rings? Absolutely, but that’s not what we got. I hope we can only get better from here and grow it into the epic tale that it is and deserves to be on the big screen. One can only hope. So would I recommend it? Yes, but with caveats. It really is good, but it’s not great the way it should have been and I hope they can improve if this goes forward. 

7.5/10    

The Dark Tower Finally Releases a Trailer!

Hey everyone, here with a very special bit of news! The film adaptation of The Dark Tower has finally released a trailer! And of course it had to do so while I was out of town for a couple of days and didn’t have time to do a proper review for it (although a post about what we did while we were gone is also forthcoming…). So now that we’re home again and work is done for the week, let’s check out our first look at The Dark Tower.

We started off with two teasers the day before the trailer dropped that were a kind of lead-in to our protagonist, Roland Deschain, and our antagonist, the Man in Black. There’s not much to them really, and the only thing I really want to point out from those teasers is the door in the first shot of Roland’s teaser. It’s a shot that isn’t in the full trailer, but it’s an image with a lot of meaning for a fan like me. I can’t read the nameplate at the top of the frame, but somewhere I saw it suggested it said ‘1919’, nineteen being an important number as well.

But let’s get into the real meat of the thing and talk the trailer itself. To do this as honestly and accurately as possible, I’m going to have to do a bit of a double-review. Basically, I’ll try and give my thoughts on it as a film separate from my thoughts as a fan. We’ll see how this goes. It’s hard, but I think we can get through this together.

My Thoughts on the Trailer as a Film

As far as this trailer goes, this provides an excellent introduction to the characters without giving away too much. We get a few lines about sort of who and what Roland is, and we see that contrasted with Jake, a kid from our own world. Intermingled with that is a few references to The Man In Black and the role he plays in all of this. I like that it gives enough for someone not familiar with the source material enough to have an understanding of who and what the characters are. There’s a good-vs-evil vibe spelled out quite clearly without needing to know anything else about the characters that makes it easy to put the characters in the right spots in your mind.

Visually, there’s some really gorgeous stuff going on. There’s some great shots of bleak, broken down worlds in various states of decay contrasted by very ordinary, very modern shots of our own world. We even get a couple of brief glimpses of the Tower itself. I didn’t notice any CG that looked really dodgy the way I did with the Pirates trailers and I thought the visuals overall were really good. There is a bit of a dark palette throughout but it doesn’t wash the whole thing out like in something like Man of Steel.

The acting we see here looks very impressive as well. Idris Elba is both world-weary and completely badass as the gunslinger, a gruff-type but doesn’t come off too much like a stereotype. Matthew McConaughey doesn’t do anything overtly evil in the trailer, or even seem that scary, but there’s a certain maniacal menace in him that he really sells. I thought his casting was brilliant from Day One, so I’m happy to see him really fit the role. I didn’t know anything about Tom Taylor before this, but he is sizing up to make a great Jake Chambers from what we see here, even if he looks older than his book counterpart.

Overall, this is a really good trailer and was much better than I hoped/feared it would be. Now hopefully the film itself lives up to that promise because it really looks like we might have something good on our hands here, even after all the rigmarole we went through to get to this point.

My Thoughts as a Fan

As a fan, I have a lot of thoughts. Now that I’ve done my best to be objective, let’s throw all that out the window and fan-out. Some of this is speculation, and I don’t think there would be any spoilers in this part, except maybe for the books? This part might also be less structured. You’ve been warned. Also, I will link anything that needs further explanation because I’m sure a lot of it will sound like gobbledygook.

-First off, I apologize for any fan-lamenting or any untoward thing I even thought about Idris Elba’s casting initially. Yes, he might not look like Roland, but I’ll be damned if he isn’t embodying the character beautifully. I got chills when he said ‘I do not aim with my hand….’ near the end and was swooning by the time he got to ‘I kill with my heart’. I really like the accent he’s using as well, it feels like it will fit Roland’s way of speaking really nicely. Awesome all around.

-Matthew McConaughey is perfect for The Man In Black. Moving on.

-I’m seeing elements from the first three books or so here. Hope they aren’t cramming too much in/leaving too much out with however they plan on doing the story. There's a reason I always thought this unfilmable due to how complicated it is so I wonder how much will be 'streamlined'. Then again, it's not an exact adaptation, so who knows.

-The pictures Jake has drawn at 0:34 are really interesting. The Tower, the field of roses (The Can’-Ka No Rey), what could be some kind of tunnel, some possible Slow Mutants, doors, eyes, what might be a reclining/sitting figure, maybe alluding to Susannah? Maybe I’m reading too much into these, and I really need a better look at them. Or maybe I just really want Eddie and Susannah, too. They're such great characters and I hope that if these films continue, they will be introduced, even though they'd have to do something different with the relationship between Susannah and Roland.

-0:40- cameo from the Overlook Hotel!

-So we are skipping the whole being pushed into traffic thing and going straight to the Dutch Hill Mansion as Jake’s entry to Mid-World? Does that eliminate the part with the Slow Mutants under the mountains, and thus the tagline for the whole film now either makes no sense or has to change in context? Although we do get a quick shot of the house demon at 1:50, which looked really cool. Without Eddie, we’re also losing a lot of context of the mansion itself, not to mention his and Susannah’s actions when Jake uses that door.

-Roland better follow up that ‘there are no gunslingers’ line with something like ‘I am the last’. Why does he seem so reluctant at times in this trailer? If there is one thing the character of Roland Deschain is most definitely not, it’s reluctant. Especially when it comes to the Tower. Don’t pull that crap, trailer.

-1:29- long abandoned ride(?) named Pennywise. Nice.

-Okay, I know it looks like there’s a sky beam. I promise you, it shouldn’t be. There are Beams, but they aren’t the same as the ones that have become a standard trope in these kind of movies. At least they shouldn’t be. On that note, I want to see Shardik. Because I really wanna see a giant, cyborg bear on screen.

-The shot right before the Dutch Hill Mansion demon, ‘All Hail the Crimson King’ is written on the wall. Nice detail and glad to see it.

-At the end, in between watching that awesome shot Roland makes, I’m trying to place the location. They obviously are in some sort of settlement in Mid-World, but the only one in the first book is Tull, which is before Jake shows up. It ends badly for everyone in that town and I don’t know if they’ll go that route. No word yet on a rating but I doubt we’ll get the Battle of Tull as it went down in the books. I do wonder if/how certain things might be changed or toned down in the movie. Although Roland did plug that guy through the head at the end there, so maybe we won’t have to worry so much about that. There is some definitely weird stuff that happens, though, and I have a hard time believing that a lot of it will stay intact.

Alright, so there are my myriad thoughts on The Dark Tower trailer. I’m kind of cautiously optimistic now, to be perfectly honest. This might actually be really good. I hope. Please. What did you guys think? Will anyone else be joining Roland on his journey come August 4^th? I know there were a lot of other trailers and things dropped this week, but this was kind of the big one I was waiting to talk about. In the next day or two I’ll also have a little write-up about our out-of-town trip and what we did there. So, until then, folks!