The Dark Tower is the new movie based sorta on Stephen King’s 8 book epic Gunslinger series of novels. I say sorta because it’s a 90 minute movie that apparently isn’t directly based on any of the books (I’ve read it either takes place after the books or is an amalgamation of book 1 and 6). And it drops you into the mythos of those books with an audience viewpoint character that they desperately hope will explain what’s going on. Unfortunately, it winds up feeling like you just started watching Game of Thrones in season 6 and you know that something serious has gone on before you started watching…
None of this vague world-building bothered me really while watching but I imagine it will bug the hell out of some people. I read the first two books back in high school so I don’t know the full story… but you get the sense that a lot of stuff – whether it was in those books or not – has happened before the movie starts and you are just wandering into the world.
So the basic premise is that there are multiple universes all protected by The Dark Tower. If the tower falls, life as we know it ends. The Man in Black (not Johnny Cash, but instead Mathew McConaughey) is an evil sorcerer who wants to destroy the tower and Roland Deschain is the Gungslinger tasked with stopping him. There is a kid from our world who dreams about all of this because he has The Shine… or The Shining (there’s even a brief photograph of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining movie). He runs into Roland, the last Gunslinger, who is the protagonist of the novels but here he’s the sidekick basically. This iconic character who is on the cover of all the novels isn’t even the hero of his own movie.
So is any of this any good? Meh… it’s alright. The movie is just a great big nothing of a movie… it’s neither good, nor bad. It’s short and feels like there should be more to it… it looks good and is clearly competently made. But nothing is very interesting and the action scenes are somewhere between mediocre to decent. The film just feels small and abrupt… again like you are walking into the season finale of something you’ve otherwise missed. The budget doesn’t appear very high so you get a low-grade effort.
The most damning comment I’ve read about the movie is that it feels like a PG-13 YA novel adaptation… but it’s based on an epic Steven King series which should not be PG-13 or feel like a YA adaptation. It needed a bigger budget and grander or darker vision.
As noted, Mathew McConaughey plays the villain, the Man in Black. It’s an interestingly sinister performance but I’m not sure it’s a correct performance for this movie. It’s a weird contradiction – he seems to be playing a kind of interesting and laconic villain who should be far more oily or slyly or charismatically evil.
Idris Elba plays the Gunslinger… aaaaand that’s about all I can say. He’s fine, I guess. I think I’m supposed to heap praise on him because Idris Elba is a good actor but he just kind of walked through the movie, not making much of an impression.
I doubt anyone really needs to see this movie. Newcomers will shrug and either go along with the weirdness of it or be turned off by it – but it won’t impress anyone. Fans of the books will probably be really annoyed since it doesn’t really seem to tell the story from the books. I overall came away from the movie thinking this is the western sci-fi mash-up tv series HBO should have made instead of Westworld.
Score: 73