The Dark Tower - Review Thread

It's always such a guessing game as to whether or not a movie will live up to what it could be.  Some movies take forever to make it to the big screen but once they arrive are so good that you're glad they waited, took their time, and delivered an impressive piece of cinema.  Some movies live in development hell forever, and just when you think it's not going to happen, a studio assembles all the necessary pieces and a movie is made that's so awful and uninspired you wish it had stayed in development hell a lot longer.  Unfortunately, The Dark Tower falls into the latter.  At a brisk running time of around 95 minutes, the movie adaptation of Stephen King's sprawling book series feels like the meekest attempt imaginable at taking the very surface ideas the books represent and refurbishing them in as by the numbers fashion as you'll see in a major studio picture.  The Dark Tower isn't just a bad movie because of its ugly CGI, corny action, and blatant expositional dialogue, but it's the worst kind of bad movie because there isn't a shred of innovation taking place within it despite having a well of material already laid out to draw from.  It's one of those films that immediately sends any notion of it launching a franchise into the abyss, a movie so inept at everything it attempts that will leave you pondering what took this so long to come out?  Even attempting to distance yourself from the books and accept this movie as a standalone success is impossible due to its incoherent plot and questionable decision making.  Alas, as someone who read the books years ago, I can firmly state that this is about as close to worst case scenario for this adaptation to have gone.  It's not a film that's insulting or annoying or dull, but one that simply doesn't try to do anything but disguise itself as a lazy cash grab off a popular license.

When it comes to books being adapted into movies, I try to be as open minded as I can be.  The reality is that from book to screenplay, material has to be cut out and altered.  The trick is how much and what, but the science doesn't have to be exact.  With that in mind, I accepted this film deviating from the plot of the books a bit and condensing King's books, though the 95 minute running time understandably had me extremely skeptical from the start.  And let's face it, King's books are filled with plenty of mumbo jumbo where you just sort of accept it and say "okay Stephen, even though some of this feels like you're making this up as you're going along."  Still, the changes made for the film are just senseless and at times completely preposterous.  The most glaring of these is that the film begins with Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) and maintains its focus on him for the majority of the film.  Meanwhile the actual star of the show, Roland Deschain (Idris Elba), is mostly relegated to tagalong bounty hunter and is utterly wasted.  We get no insight into Roland as a character aside from really on-the-nose backstory and the fact that he's just a gruff badass wandering the Waste Land.  Roland is chasing The Man in Black, or Walter (Matthew McConaughey), an evil wizard who seeks to destroy the Dark Tower.  The Dark Tower stands at the center of the many worlds that inhabit the universe, and its destruction would lead to evil entities from other universes to wreak havoc on the multiple worlds the Tower protects.  

To be honest I have no idea how anyone who hasn't read the books and is watching this movie will absorb much more than that in regards to the plot.  Most of the time the film is completely nonsensical despite spending most of its running time attempting to explain these absurdities onscreen.  King's books weave between different elements of fantasy, science fiction, westerns, and contemporary literature.  It's a difficult blend to pull off, but its a downright mess on the big screen.  The film never feels like any of these genres and really doesn't make much of an attempt at being any of them either.  There's no sense of awe in this world.  We jump around from place to place, but the scale of these worlds and the impact of the Dark Tower feels so small and unimportant.  Again, for someone walking into this film blind I have no idea what they'd have to work with to latch onto this film.  It's a fantasy without world building, it's a western that has its gunslinger defer to a child from contemporary New York, it's a revenge film that builds no real tension between the two leads.  It's not so much that individual scenes are awful, but that none of them add up to anything compelling.  We have no real reason to care if Roland kills Walter or not.  We have little reason to feel dread if the Dark Tower falls.  It's just astounding that a film with eight books at its disposal neglects to tell any form of story or bask in this unique world to build upon.  

In addition to the complete absence of storytelling and overall tone, The Dark Tower is below average in everything it attempts.  There's no real pacing or structure to the film.  We just sort of go from here to there and intercut scenes of Walter doing a Killgrave impression in-between.  The film never just stops to allow plot-related exposition to take hold, or to introduce the viewer to interesting nuances about the fantasy world barely even hinted at.  And I don't mean that the film moves at such a breakneck pace that it all feels too frantic.  On the contrary, despite the film operating with the sole intention of fading in and then fading to black, it moves like a glacier that carries every expected story beat that every weak PG-13, half-assed studio film contains.  The film is on an assembly line and fills its time with corny dialogue (Roland's reciting of the Gunslinger code the third time around was literally cringing) and bland situations that Roland and Jake find themselves in.  They never stay in one place for too long, and nothing within these universes feel worth exploring anyways.  The movie is shot mostly in close and rarely wide, so maybe the filmmakers knew they had nothing to show either.  The one saving grace of the film is that when Roland does get to do his thing, it's entertainingly cheesy.  The bullet play is completely absurd, but Roland does get to show off some slick moves while dispatching mindless cohorts.  Still, with none of this being set up correctly it all feels irrelevant and another example of the movie just filling time.  Even Roland and Walter's showdown at the end of the film is highly underwhelming and  It's just sort of puzzling why at no point in the film do they let a scene play out like it should.  What's the rush?  If they were trying to establish a franchise, why did they jump around across all of the books inserting several plot elements that feel completely out of place instead of just focusing on the beginning and going from there?  It's conventional, yeah, but for a reason.  We can at least establish this world and Roland as a character in order to give a damn about this quest, about the main element that the series' plot revolves around, and then build on that.  

 In the end we just don't care about Roland or his journey.  I should be more upset about this film's lazy and inept attitude toward its source material, and that it took this many years to bring such an uninspired and completely worthless adaptation to the big screen.  But as I mentioned earlier, this is a terrible movie that lacks any singular moments of cinematic agony, but rather just operates like a poorly tuned factory blockbuster from a studio that reeks of movies just like this.  The film is laden with bad CGI, ugly dialogue, a complete lack of tone and style, mediocre cinematography, and wastes the talents of Elba and McConaughey.  The film is harmless in a way, but I'm not going to let it off the hook.  This is a bad film that attempts nothing.  This is the worst kind of movie, one that accepts squandering numerous pages of material to deliver a poorly laid trick to people like me who have been starved for seeing this book series in visual form.  It's nothing more than a cash grab that lacks any ingenuity or care.  It's soulless filmmaking at its total worst, but at least they're not trying to hide that.

4/10