The Dark Tower Review

Wait, it's August? Time for an entire month of terrible movies!


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What is it about August and its deluge of terrible movie?

Like January, August is the month that not many people seem to care about in terms of movies. Summer's winding down, Oscar season and Halloween haven't begun yet, but it seems that this allows for a full range of movies that no one would ever see otherwise. Case in point, The Dark Tower.

The Dark Tower is a tricky beast to tackle for two reasons; one, it's based off of a best selling novel series that I have not read at all, and two, I'm not a huge Stephen King fan. Oh he's told some great stories, but whenever his pieces are adapted into a film, it always seems like they're going to be bad. Now that's not true for all of them like Shawshank, The Shining, and Misery, but he does have a lot more misses than he does hits with movie versions.

Thankfully, both of those points don't matter because The Dark Tower sucks on its own, so kudos to it! It doesn't matter if Stephen King's name is attached to it, or if it's based off of a series of books I haven't read yet. It's a terrible movie, and I'm pretty sure that if I knew more about the series, I would be even more pissed at it for butchering a series beloved by many. So where do we begin? Well, might as well spoil this entire thing because clearly no one is defending this hunk of junk film.

Now, for those who are uninitiated, like myself, from the brief bit of research that I've done on the series, I have found a plot overview of the series on Wikipedia. Just read this first, then we'll talk.

"In the story, Roland Deschain is the last living member of a knightly order known as gunslingers and the last of the line of "Arthur Eld", his world's analogue of King Arthur. Politically organized along the lines of a feudal society, it shares technological and social characteristics with the American Old West but is also magical. Many of the magical aspects have vanished from Mid-World, but traces remain as do relics from a technologically advanced society. Roland's quest is to find the Dark Tower, a fabled building said to be the nexus of all universes. Roland's world is said to have "moved on", and it appears to be coming apart at the seams. Mighty nations have been torn apart by war, entire cities and regions vanish without a trace and time does not flow in an orderly fashion. Sometimes, even the sun rises in the north and sets in the east."

So to be perfectly honest, that's a pretty interesting overview. We have a unique world with a unique protagonist, interesting mythology, and a mystery about what the exact "Dark Tower" is. Not only that, but it incorporates elements and even ideas used in previous Stephen King works to make a gigantic flowing universe that connects all of his ideas together. So, it's pretty cool! So what does the movie focus on?

Well, it's about a kid who has family issues that sees Roland in his dreams and Matthew McConaughey wants to destroy the Dark Tower. Oh, and the movie barely takes place in this mystical world, instead it's in New York. 

I'm not even a fan of this series and that set up alone pisses me off to no ends. 

I mean, who was it that decided to take this over 4,000 page series with a complex mythology and fantastical elements and set it in New York City and focus it on a kid tat isn't even that interesting. We're told that he's super special and an incredibly strong psychic, but none of it matters when he's pretty much the sidekick to our hero, and yet we're supposed to follow him as our main character. Barely any time getting to know Roland, Mid-World, what the Dark Tower even does, or why Matthew McConaughey's character, the Man in Black, wants to destroy it. The answer? Suck it. 

I mean, I should just stop the review there. Fundamentally, the movie doesn't work. It spends more than half of its run time in New York and brings up a whole slew of ideas that are never discussed or explained. Apparently the Man in Black has an army of henchmen that steal people's skin to disguise their hideous appearances. Why? Read the books. Gunslingers are sacred figures in Mid-World that must be revered and followed. Why? Read the damn books. Apparently there are no chickens in Mid-World for some reason. Why? Bitch, I told you to read the books! Who is the Crimson King that we hear references to in the film? READ. THE. BOOKS. 

When your strip all of the lore away, lore that doesn't make any sense and it thrown around haphazardly mind you, you have a simple good vs. evil story. Roland vs. the Man in Black, and the kid is meant to be our POV into their feud. Look, I hate to tell you this, but it's your great conflict between good and evil is wasted when we're seeing it through the eyes of a dumb child that we never get to know, never get to like, and is insufferable because of his attitude. 

Adding on to that, the editing is all over the place and it feels like this movie was sliced to ribbons just to fit a 95 minute run time. You'll have scenes just end for no good reason, or have character moments that amount to nothing. There's a scene late in the movie where the kid (and yes he has a name, but really, does anyone care at this point?) is angry at Roland for being so obsessed with his revenge that it caused the kid's mom to be killed by the Man in Black. Let's ignore the fact that we've barely gotten to know Roland, so this whole obsessive character trait doesn't make sense, but whatever. The next scene, without any other dialogue dividing when these two character's talk, has Roland apologizing to the kid and becoming his more or less surrogate dad. They have target practice, plot point is over! It doesn't even last for a minute the tension between these two. 

And then we have McConaughey. Hey, remember the 90's when no one took him seriously because he just had that "McConaughey" voice that people used to make fun of him for? You know, the voice that people still use to say "Alright, alright, alright"? You didn't even need me to tell you it, you thought of it in your head. Well, he's gone back to that style of acting where nothing he does is compelling or interesting and he just sounds so bored out of his skull. There are times where he tries to make it a compelling performance, but it just doesn't get anywhere no matter how little he tries. 

So after I saw this movie, a friend of mine asked which was worse; this, or The Emoji Movie. Is it say to say I actually had to think a bit before responding to them? 

Look, The Dark Tower is a bad movie, like cataclysmically bad, and it reeks of taking a great source material and dumbing it down for the too stupid summer blockbuster audience, but it doesn't feel cynical. It doesn't feel like it was engineered to suck up money with as little effort put into it. It doesn't have product placement out the wazoo or reinforces negative ideas and thoughts. The Dark Tower is a movie that pissed me off to no end, but it's more tragic than it is deplorable. 

There are some good action scenes in it, and if the movie played a bit more into the world of the books and got rid of the kid and New York, then it could have been something different, something fresh. But the problem with that is that maybe that wouldn't be able to fix this movie. It's fun to speculate about how to make a movie better, and I may sound like an expert, but I'm not. Believe me, I'm not an expert on anything film related. I'm just a fan that has seen a lot of movies, and as much as I can theorize how to make a movie better, we're still left with the version of The Dark Tower that we got. It's dull, and it was broken from the minute they decided to rob the film of the wonder and lore of the novels. Avoid, avoid, avoid.