Monday, August 7, 2017

Review: THE DARK TOWER

by Adam Riske
Lost in translation.

After many years of development and creative turmoil, we finally get the first film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel series The Dark Tower. Unfortunately, the result feels destined to satisfy no one. I came to The Dark Tower as someone who has not read any of the novels and I can say that the movie does a lackluster job of indoctrinating a new audience to the lore and sweep of the story. It’s not a movie where I was totally at sea because it has many classic tropes of the genre (e.g. a child audience conduit into a new world, an ultimate hero facing off with an ultimate evil etc.), but the specificity lost me and my guess is the little details and not the central conflict are what makes The Dark Tower novels special to so many readers. The movie feels generic and without an authorial voice. Also, it’s one of those multiverses. Do you dig on multiverses? I dig on multiverses - but not this one.
I knew the movie was in trouble very early on because it has a whiplash approach to its world building in the first fifteen minutes. A lot is introduced and all I could help thinking the entire time was how that initial stretch was probably hundreds of pages of the novels crammed together. So much of the movie feels that way. It’s like you’ll see a scene played out in full from, say, novel #4 and then the next scene is an extrapolation of something from novel #6 and so on and so on. It has so many ideas but no idea of which one to hone in on, so the movie feels like it’s restarting constantly. The Dark Tower runs about 90 minutes without the end credits, and while normally running time isn’t an issue, in the case here I think it really is. I would be shocked if this movie wasn’t originally two hours or more and got butchered due to test screenings and studio notes. So many characters feel like they’re missing their scene to better show how all of them work together in the context of the movie (these include Fran Kranz, Abbey Lee and Jackie Earle Haley) but we never get those moments. Also, Idris Elba is so good at inhabiting his part as Roland Deschain that it had to have been informed by the novels or script elements that somehow never got translated onto the screen. Elba is the absolute bright spot in the movie and the only thing that keeps The Dark Tower out of the same breath as Jonah Hex.

On the other side, Matthew McConaughey’s performance as The Man in Black is a miscalculation. Is it true to the novels? I can’t say, but on screen he doesn’t feel threatening enough as the ultimate evil. Part of that is the movie doesn’t take the time to build him as an absolute threat, instead choosing to let McConaughey strut around like Mick Jagger and hiss his dialogue. This so feels like a performance where the actor said “I want my body language to be like a rattlesnake.” It gets annoying because it’s so one-note and unimaginative (it reminded me of Charlize Theron’s take on a big bad in The Fate of the Furious). You have to make your performance invisible within the film in a genre entry and not play it like you’re acting in quotes, which I see so many Oscar winners do when they go “slumming.” Filling out the notable cast is Tom Taylor as Jake Chambers, our guide through The Dark Tower story. He’s effective and gives the movie an earnestness that helps it along, but he’s not charismatic enough to drag the movie to success alone. No one is. Not even Idris Elba.
The Dark Tower works better when Roland leaves his universe (is it Mid-World?) and comes to New York. There is about five minutes of funny fish-out-of-water scenes with Elba and Taylor that had a Last Action Hero feel too it. The climax of the movie is also well done and exciting, as Roland tries to save Jake from The Man in Black. The rest of the movie sinks, though, under the weight of too many settings and characters and details and not enough patience to let the story play out on its own terms. Everything is rushed and very little is earned, which results in the movie feeling slow because I didn’t connect with it. It’s difficult to get wrapped up in the movie when the entire time you’re like “Wait, what’s that monster? Do I want the tower to fall or don’t I want it to fall? Why is the tower important at all? What do the beams shooting into the sky mean?” I’m sure there were answers to all of these in a throwaway line of dialogue somewhere, but at that point I had stopped caring.

I feel bad for fans of The Dark Tower novels more than anything. This is an easy movie for a Dark Tower virgin to shake off, but for a true fan it must be difficult to see your thing bastardized and fail so much that it might be a long time before it gets the adaptation/re-interpretation on-screen that it deserves. All in all, The Dark Tower is not the worst movie of the summer, but it is a major missed opportunity.

9 comments:

  1. Like you said, it's a movie that will satisfy no one. It doesn't give people new to the series anything to latch onto. Having read all the books (and some of the comics) I can say it's not even a greatest hits of the series so much as a Frankenstein's Monster of ideas kinda lifted from the books, but in most cases it's like the bootleg action figure version of those ideas.

    I'm not the kind of person that needs a page for page translation of the books mind you. I'm enjoying the Preacher TV series immensely for instance and that deviates wildly from the comics. It took a while to get going, but they at least started with a core that sort of felt right. It's kind of an interesting comparison in fact since the Dark Tower movie essentially gave the Man in Black the power of Jesse Custer/Genesis.

    The Dark Tower just doesn't have that core, and in fact doesn't have much of anything. It's not that they got the Man in Black wrong for instance. I mean, they did but in the sense that on paper all they did was give him the Word of God from Preacher plus he can catch bullets and then they just sorta left McConaughey to figure the rest out. There doesn't seem to be a character for him anywhere in the script.

    The Dark Tower series itself is a bit of a mess from the first book which took years to complete and had to be revised later, to the later books which introduce King himself as a character. Not all of it works and at least half of it isn't suited to be adapted to film. Maybe they could have come up with something that at least felt right, but this movie plays things so safe in terms of actual consequences that there's no soul to it and certainly not one that feels like the books.

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    1. Also it was a pretty easy film for me to shake off. The warning signs were all there in advance from the long time in development hell to the completely mismatched team of writers.

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  2. i've not read the books, but i've read the comics (prequels i think). those were awesome and i wished they'd done that instead.

    i've seen the movie weeks ago (yes, weeks. don't ask) and found it pretty boring. i couldn't wait to see what other people would think of it. i hated the Young Adult feel to it and most of the characters were ill defined or just plain boring. i mean, i saw it coming from the first trailer, but i still had hope because Idris Elba is awesome and every movie deserve a chance (yes, even michael bay's)

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    1. It was super boring. Also, yes, totally agree on the YA thing. I heard another reviewer say that so I didn't want to pass it on as my own thought in the review. It feels about as grand in scope as The Giver.

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  3. I've read the books and when I first heard that this wasn't a direct adaptation and more a continuing of the story, I breathed a breath of fresh air. I was excited about the Easter Eggs found throughout and it works as a film if it's taken as a Where's Waldo-esque book of Stephen King secrets.

    The saving grace of this movie is the wonderful Idris Elba who was everything I could ask for in a Gunslinger.

    Great review Adam. I enjoyed this flick because it may be the only Dark Tower adaptation we get. I'm saddened because it did try to do way too much in 90 minutes. It certainly isn't the worst film to receive such low ratings on rotten tomatoes. Suicide Squad and McCarthy's The Boss are absolute garbage. They both have a higher rating than this flick. All is not right in the world.

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    1. The Dark Tower is better than Suicide Squad. I agree there.

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  4. Wait so this isn't just the first of like 3 or 4 movies? They tried to do the whole thing in one?

    This is the first review I've read and it's great but I'm so pre-disappointed it almost hurts. Sounds worse than I was already imagining.

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    1. It's not that they tried to cram all the books into one movie, they just took some stuff from various books possibly because they wanted something that would be self-contained if they weren't able to make any sequels. There was still talk of doing a TV series last week but they were waiting to find a cable channel to partner with before going into production on anything. The odds of that happening are looking somewhat slim judging by the box office numbers.

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    2. Yeah I guess I had just always assumed they were tackling it as at least a trilogy or why bother - I'm kind of stunned King even went for that bullshit. I totally get the commercial reasons now that I've had a minute to wrap my head around it (this is literally the first I've heard that this was a self-contained one-off - was that common knowledge?) but it makes me kinda sad about today's market that it dictated so much compromise in both tone and length. As a fan of the novels I don't NEED the story shown to me so I'm not really upset on that level, but it does suck that it apparently can't even be done.

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