The Dark Tower

Year 12, Day 277 - 10/3/20 - Movie #3,666

BEFORE: Look at that, I've got a "666" right there in the film's number, totally arbitrary, I know, but you love to see that during Halloween season, right?  I remember way back in Year 2 that I saved the horror movie "It" for the slot numbered 666, and I thought that was really clever.  Of course, that was the 1990 two episode mini-series based on the Stephen King novel, not the 2017 big screen adaptation of the same story.  I've got "It: Chapter Two" coming up at the end of the month, also "Doctor Sleep" in about two weeks, so it's a big month for catching up on Stephen King, a perennial choice for movies around here during October.  King's been so prolific that it seems there are always a couple more movies based on his books to watch - I'll still have the remake of "Pet Sematary", the original "Salem's Lot" and a couple of lesser works left after this month is over.

(Movies #1,666 and #2,666 don't fit the pattern and are therefore discounted.  There's nothing demonic about Woody Allen's "September", is there?)

Fran Kranz carries over from "The Cabin in the Woods".  There's a film called "A Good Marriage" based on a Stephen King story, it's available on AmazonPrime, and I could have linked there via Kristen Connolly, but then that's a dead end, I couldn't proceed any further from there, so that link is also hereby discounted.

THE PLOT: A boy haunted by visions of a dark tower from a parallel reality teams up with the tower's disillusioned guardian to stop an evil warlock known as the Man in Black, who plans to use the boy to destroy the tower and open the gates of Hell.

AFTER: Again, I offered to hold off on this one until Saturday afternoon, to give my wife a chance to watch this with me, but she declined, despite being a big fan of (some of) Stephen King's books.  And again, I point out that unlike me, she seems to know a thing or two about what movies to not watch.  Maybe she just didn't get into the whole "Dark Tower" series, which is a complex set of eight books and two short stories, incorporating elements of horror, fantasy and Westerns, which many people have described over the years as "basically unfilmable" - and yet somebody persisted.  Note that I didn't use the word "succeeded".

I have to back up a bit here, because it took about 10 years to bring this film to the screen, beginning back in 2007 when J.J. Abrams and the other creators of "Lost", Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, optioned the rights from King, who happened to be a big fan of "Lost", and agreed that maybe these were the right guys for the job.  The "Lost" guys, on the other hand, were big Stephen King fans, and maybe that's what got in the way when they tried to adapt the series into film form.  It's inevitable that some changes need to be made when adapting a book into a movie, some things have to be condensed, some characters or plotlines might need to be dropped, but if they think that's like chipping pieces off of a Michelangelo sculpture, they may not be able to do what needs to be done.  This is what held up "Watchmen" for so many years, and finally a filmmaker came along and realized that the comic book was, in itself, already the perfect storyboard for a movie. (Mostly...)

Ron Howard and Universal Pictures then spent five years trying to adapt the series, planning a trilogy of films and then a couple of TV mini-series to bridge the gaps in-between.  Casting choices were bouncing around between Viggo Mortensen and Javier Bardem, then later Russell Crowe and Liam Neeson.  But after spending $5 million on the rights to the stories (the "Lost" guys spent only $19.00)
Universal started cutting back the project's budget, and talking about a Netflix release instead of a theatrical one.  Suddenly the script had to be re-written to accommodate the smaller budget, and I'll bet that suddenly the process of cutting out characters and plotlines got a lot easier when there was less money to go around.

Sony Pictures got involved in 2015, with a re-worked script and a renewed sense of purpose, also a new director, so Ron Howard was out (don't worry about him, he landed on his feet), some definitive casting choices were finally made, and the film was on track for a 2017 release.  But really, by this point with so many irons in the fire, so many re-workings of the script, could the final film even resemble the original book series any more?  Because of all this monkeying around, I'm fairly sure that the story here has been gutted of most pertinent details, and is now little more than a framework of a plot, containing just a few basic elements.  It's really just down to "good guy battles bad guy" at this point, with sort of half a point to make which no longer makes any sense, assuming that it made sense in the first place, which I doubt.

Basically our Earth, our reality, is one of several, and protecting all the different realities in the universe is the titular Dark Tower, which somehow keeps all the bad nasty things that are outside the universe from getting in.  The Man in Black wants to destroy the tower, somehow using a power generated from the minds of kidnapped Earth children, to let the bad things in from Hell (?) and the last Gunslinger is trying to stop the Man in Black, thereby saving the Tower and protecting the universe.  Jake is an Earth kid who has "The Shine" and has been drawing images of the Gunslinger and the Man in Black, and figures out the location of a portal to get off our Earth and into Midworld, where the Gunslinger is, to help take down the Man in Black.  Again, this feelsl like an extremely over-simplified version of a much more complex story, and once I'm done here I'm going to go look up the plot of the Stephen King books, and I'm certain they'll be much more elaborate.

My understanding is that there were going to be all sorts of connections to other Stephen King stories, because I thought they all took place in the same universe, but maybe I missed them, or failed to understand the connections, because now I have to go look those up too.  Damn, why is this movie requiring me to do so much extra work?  Why can't I just say this is a lame movie and move on?  I just don't have that in me, apparently.  Or maybe I was thinking of that "Castle Rock" series on Hulu, the one that is filled with Easter eggs and inside references to the other films in the Stephen King-verse.  I suppose I could go watch that show, but I'm in the middle of Season 1 of "Jessica Jones" right now, and I want to finish the Marvel series that are on Netflix before they expire.  I already watched "Daredevil", "Punisher" and "The Defenders", but not "Jessica Jones", "Cage" and "Iron Fist".  Since we still don't know when the pandemic's going to end, maybe I can still keep working on this, then think about "Castle Rock".

But it's kind of funny that I'm 8 episodes in on "Jessica Jones" where the main villain, Kilgrave (aka the Purple Man) has mind control powers (aka power of suggestion) and coincidentally, so does the Man in Black.  He can tell people to "hate" or "stop breathing" and then that's what they'll do, and they're powerless to fight back.  The only people immune to his powers seem to be Jake and the Gunslinger (Roland), which seems extremely convenient.  The Man in Black is also referred to as a "warlock", but I wasn't sure if this is accurate, or if he was a demon, the Devil, or what.  Again, an appalling lack of details here for people who never read the books.  I'm usually torn over whether I should read the book first before seeing a movie version, like I bought the novel "Ready Player One" but never got around to reading it, and now that I've found I enjoy the movie, it's kind of too late to read the book.  Again, going back to "Watchmen", I loved the comic and I was glad the film was very faithful to it, except the film had a slightly different ending, which I preferred over the book's.  (Since I don't read many books these days, it's becoming less and less of a problem, though.)

Jake and Roland learn that they need to destroy the Man in Black's machine that's trying to take down the Tower, but it's six months away by foot.  Their solution is to use a portal to get to our Earth, then use another portal to get closer to the machine.  This was also fairly confusing, like I thought the tower was somehow outside all realities so it could protect all realities, so how can it be on Mid-World, too?  Again, please dumb it down for us clueless people.  Anyway, that's the plan, only the Man in Black traps Roland in a gun store and then brings Jake with him to his machine, to use Jake's power to make another attempt on the Tower.  Roland then has to find the portal back to Mid-World and wait for Jake to send him instructions on how to use it, then defeat the Man in Black.  Simple, right?

At least this all clocks in at about 90 minutes, so even though it felt like a waste of time, at least it won't waste too much of your time - I'm afraid that's the best I can say about it.  Disappointing, on so many levels.

They shopped around a TV series that would have perhaps been closer to the book series and tell the story leading up to this movie, but it got shopped around to Netflix and AmazonPrime and it seems that everybody took a pass.  Now there are rumblings about a sequel to this, but I wouldn't hold my breath.  Considering the terrible production timelines that were involved in developing this movie, I think it's more likely that another 10 years will pass before somebody tries to re-boot this storyline, similar to how movies like "The Golden Compass", "Westworld" and "Lost in Space" got hot again as new TV series after a required fallow period.

Also starring Idris Elba (last seen in "The Mountain Between us"), Matthew McConaughey (last seen in "Fyre Fraud"), Tom Taylor (last seen in "The Kid Who Would Be King"), Claudia Kim (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Abbey Lee (last seen in "Office Christmas Party"), Jackie Earle Haley (last seen in "The Birth of a Nation"), Katheryn Winnick (last seen in "Killers"), Dennis Haysbert (last seen in "Fist Fight"), Michael Barbieri (last seen in "Spider-Man: Homecoming"), Jose Zuniga (last seen in "The Most Hated Woman in America"), Nicholas Hamilton (last seen in "Captain Fantastic"), De-Wet Nagel, Ben Gavin, Nicholas Pauling, Inge Beckmann, Alfredo Narciso (last seen in "Phil Spector"), Eva Kaminsky, Robbie McLean, Mark Elderkin, Karl Thaning, Reon Van der Watt, Kenneth Fok (last seen in "Serenity"), Gabe Gabriel, Bill Walters.

RATING: 4 out of 10 helpful villagers