Jamie
Now here’s the main event. Everything about The Dark Tower saga was a disaster. We aren’t just talking about a Stephen King adaptation, which historically have been a boon for BMT. We aren’t just talking about a “long gestating project” where every filmmaker under the sun declared the property to be very important to them, wanting to make a multimedia empire of it, and then bailing once the gestation got even longer. We aren’t just talking about a bold reimagining of the property to the point where the filmmakers had to be like “no no no, you don’t understand. It’s not actually an adaptation of The Dark Tower… it’s just another entry in the series.” This is all three of those things. Once aiming to encompass the series in films, TV, Quibi shows (probably), etc. they instead dropped a 95 minute original Dark Tower story right in the laps of the fans of the series. That… didn’t go well.
To recap, Jake Chambers is a boy who dreams about all kinds of crazy things. He dreams of a man in black aiming to destroy the world using the minds of kids like himself. He dreams of a gunslinger who is one of the only ones that stands in his way. He dreams of alien creatures scouring the Earth for… him. This would all be OK if it wasn’t for the fact that they make everyone think he’s crazy. It’s also a little strange that while he’s dreaming these things there appears to be a real life connection to a series of earthquakes in NYC. When his mom and stepdad look to send him to a special school to take care of things he starts to suspect that his dreams are real and those that have arrived to take him away are in the service of the man in black. He makes a run for it and goes in search of a house he saw in his dreams. Once there he is sucked into another dimension… the world that he dreamed of. There he finds Roland, the gunslinger, and he is convinced to help Jake interpret his dreams about the man in black, who Roland knows as Walter. Meanwhile, Walter follows the path of Jake and kills his mother and stepdad after determining that Jake is powerful enough to single handedly achieve his goal: destroying the Dark Tower and consuming Earth. Jake and Roland find out that they have to go back to Earth to get to the Tower and while there Jake is captured by Walter. Before he is taken to the Tower he is able to alert Roland about how to follow and then keeps the portal open so that Walter and Roland have to fight. They do and Roland wins. He and Jake destroy the machine and head off on many adventures we are sure to see in the sequels. THE END.
I’m always a little ready to defend films like this. Just because something doesn’t stay true to the source material doesn’t mean it’s necessarily bad. Maybe by not reading the Dark Tower books it would put me in a position to be like “it’s more different than bad.” Ehhhhhh. They really did take a beloved book franchise by a master of fantasy, science fiction, and horror and turned it into a YA novel. It reads like Harry Potter or The Maze Runner or, god help us, Divergent. It honestly is a lot like what the Platonic Solids series would be (with fewer sexy swamp monsters and phantoms of the opera). Imagine for a second that they made the It film and instead of it being a horror film it was more like Stand By Me with McConaughey playing Pennywise who now isn’t a clown but more like a land developer looking to turn their pops’ soda pop shop into a parking lot… people might have a problem with that. Just to end on a positive note, I did like how short it was and also there was a scene where Idris Elba shoots someone from like a mile away that was cool. He gunslang real good. Otherwise, I already barely remember this movie and fully understand the reviews.
Hot Take Clam Bake! What if… Earth was actually the dreams. Whooooaaaaa. Maybe when Jake was dreaming he was actually awake and when we see Jake on Earth it’s actually the dream. Five seconds after the end of the film it actually ends with a close up on Roland’s eye and it opens. Then Roland’s wife is like “Honey, you OK. Another dream?” and he’s like “Yah… I dreamed about that kid Jake again… I gotta draw it out.” And he rolls out of bed and makes a sick charcoal drawing of Jake and hangs it up on his wall amongst all the other pictures of Jake. Then the movie starts in on a perfect, straight adaptation of The Gunslinger and fans. Go. Crazy. Hot Take Temperature: The Scorch.
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! Are we talking about yet another Stephen King adaptation except this is for maybe the fourth (?) book in a long running franchise … someone check on Stephen King he might be doing too much cocaine again. Let’s go!
Whoops they accidentally made this a Young Adult novel adaptation.
Because I’ve read the first in the series before and it is a weird and wild western / sci-fi / fantasy oddity. The stuff in this movie I don’t think comes into play until Stephen King almost died in that car accident and then he started to connect all his books via the inbetween worlds from The Mist. I think the big mistake was jumping directly into the middle of the series. If anything, make a prequel movie which then ends with Roland wandering the desert in the first book.
Instead we jump right into a story about the Dark Tower protecting humanity, and the Man in Black, and some kid, etc. etc. etc.
The kid BTW appears to just have a British accent at times. No offense to him but there are zero kids in the US who could have played this part? Are we so lacking in acting talent that you couldn’t at least plug that hole before it broke open. The accent work is quite distracting.
I do somewhat appreciate the lore though, and I also appreciate that the film doesn’t feel the need to twist stuff around to give Roland a love interest or something else weird. It has that YA feel, but more in the vein of father-son bonding rather than high school drama. That is probably at least a decent option out of all the bad YA options available.
Yeah, just a weird start to what was clearly supposed to be the beginning of a franchise. I’m not sure if they were thinking of then jumping backwards, forging a new path forwards, or whether tying up all the loose ends was just a desperate ploy once they realized that this film was not going to be well received and the franchise was dead in the water.
A decent Product Placement (What?) for Coca-Cola in the middle of the film. A bizarre Setting as a Character (Where?) for New York City since I half-expected them to reveal the kid was actually from England since that is how he sounded a lot of the time. The MacGuffin (Why?) of the Dark Tower and The Man in Black and The Gunslinger is mighty close to being that perfect Cradle of Life nonsense I love to see, but doesn’t quite get there. I think the movie is Bad, mostly boring and too YA to be entertaining, just kind of sad.
Read about my sequel in the Quiz. Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 