One of my favorite parts of the series is when the ka-tet gets captured by Blaine the bonkers AI-gone-AWOL train, which then forces them into a riddle contest (shades of Gollum and Bilbo in the passageway under the mountain). But I fear the spirit of the books may be lost. When a world is this huge and multi-dimensional, there's no hope of cramming it into a 2-hour movie. (My family is listening to The Fellowship of the Ring on Audible right now and let me just say that we are closing in on hour 10 and I am getting awful tired of Tom Bombadil.)
Dark tower movie#
I thought Arrival was more perfect on paper, but the movie was still fun, and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings adaptation was genius. Adaptations have to be different than the original material, and that alone doesn’t make them bad. Some wise parts of the internet have made their peace with that-and, maybe to its credit, the movie doesn't try. You can’t really expect the movie adaptation to capture it all. And Oy, a smart, lovable, loyal, toddler-version-of-a-talking-animal who looks like a slinky raccoon and whose eyes are rimmed with gold and if you have read the entire series and your throat doesn’t lump up at the story of Oy, then you might as well just make a reservation at the Dixie Pig and let them eat your heart because you aren't using it anyway. There’s also a place in New York called the Dixie Pig where cannibal vampire things eat people, and a place in Mid-World called Calla Bryn Sturgis that’s patrolled by robot wolves.
The long version is, well, longer: It involves not only Deschain following a bad guy called The Man in Black (aka The Walkin' Dude, aka Randall Flagg) across the desert, a psychic boy named Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor), a woman in a wheelchair with dissociative identity disorder named Odetta/Detta who has tactical sex with a demon and uses the sieve of Eratosthenes to find prime numbers, a heroin addict named Eddie who fights a gun battle naked and defeats an insane train named Blaine with dad jokes.
Dark tower full#
If you have not read the eight-book, 1.3 million-word series that forms the basis for The Dark Tower, then here is a short version of the plot: In an entropic world full of killer lobsters and magic and almost-remembered technology, a gunslinger named Roland Deschain (Elba) is on a difficult journey to a dark tower to save the world. The Dark Tower is available to watch and stream on Netflix.With the First Trailer for It, Stephen King Reclaims the ’80s Arrow The characters (Roland, Flagg, Jake, etc.), the world and mythology of the series, and the story (an expanded version) will all have to be more coherent and understandable for a film or television series to work. Well, the solution seems to have been to just scrap all that and release a shockingly short 95-minute movie that just kind of glosses over everything to the point that has any meaning or purpose." So, it seems in order to do a well-received, acclaimed adaptation of The Dark Tower, much more fleshing out will have to be done. Mike Ryan of Uproxx said it best: "I’ve been told that The Dark Tower books are jam-packed with dense plot, wonderful characters, and a sprawling mythology - which is what made the movie so hard to make for all these years. Going directly from the first two points, the biggest criticism against the Dark Tower film is that the story felt rushed, characters were not fleshed out, and that it felt like a generic action movie rather than one of the better fantasy series of our time.
Dark tower tv#
And it seems that they were heading in that direction, as a TV series adaptation of Dark Tower was set to be made, but was unfortunately canceled. In order for Hollywood to get the series right, a film would have to have a longer runtime at least two hours or longer. For a movie that took over ten years to develop and make, a run time like that was a disappointment. Critics stated that the best moments of the film were when Roland and Jake were bonding (and Elba's performance as well), but because of the run time, they could not be explored more. Characters weren't as fleshed out as they could have been the plot was immensely rushed, and important themes and messages were merely glossed over in order to get the film over with. Considering the series contains eight books and over three thousand pages, having the first film be that short was a huge detriment. One of the biggest gripes shared by most (if not all) critics, and Stephen King himself, was that the run time of The Dark Tower was way too short, coming in at a measly ninety-five minutes (roughly an hour and a half).
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