The Dark Tower (2017) Review
3/10
A boy in New York has visions of a tower, a man in black and a gunslinger. He finds a portal in a derelict house, steps through into a ruined world, and roughly seventy minutes later everything is resolved.
The 3 is for two performances and a handful of images. Elba’s Roland reloading is the only sequence in the picture that suggests anybody read the books, and McConaughey is playing an amused predator with relish in a role that’s been written down to a man who kills people by telling them to stop breathing.
Everything else is a compression failure, and it leaves me sour, because the source deserved so much better. Ninety-five minutes reads to me like a surrender, and the film plays throughout as the remains of something larger that somebody stopped paying for.
Ninety-Five Minutes
King’s series runs to eight books published between 1982 and 2012, taking in a post-apocalyptic western, a horror novel about a haunted New York lot, a train with a mind, and an author who writes himself into his own story.
The film’s response to that is to take Roland, Jake, the Man in Black and a tower, and run them through a portal-quest structure that could belong to any fantasy property. The Gunslinger’s opening line, which is among the most famous in American genre fiction, is used and then means nothing, because the desert it refers to has thirty seconds of screen time.
Nothing has room. The film delivers Roland’s history in about four lines. Characters standing still explain the Tower’s function twice, in dialogue. Jake’s mother and stepfather exist to be an obstacle and then to die.
A ninety-five minute film can be a masterpiece. This one is short because the material was cut down and cut down again, and the joins are visible in every transition.
The credited writers tell the same story. Four names on the screenplay, including Akiva Goldsman and Nikolaj Arcel, is the signature of a script that’s passed through several complete rewrites for several different intentions. Films with four writers are rarely films that anybody was permitted to finish.
The greatest-hits approach frustrates me most. The Gunslinger alone would have made a lean, strange western, and I’d have happily traded all of this for it.
Compression fails when you keep every plot point and shorten each one. What survives is a summary, and a summary has no scenes in it, only information.
The alternative is to take less and give it more. One book, or one incident, given two hours, would have produced a film. The instinct to include everything is what guarantees that nothing lands. The diagnostic: count how many of your scenes exist to deliver a fact. If the answer is most of them, you’ve written an outline and staged it.
It Is Not an Adaptation and Not a Sequel
The production’s stated position was clever and turned out to be a trap. This was to be a continuation instead of an adaptation, set after the loop of the final novel, with Roland carrying a horn he didn’t have in earlier cycles.
For readers, that’s a real idea. The series ends by returning Roland to the desert to begin again with one thing changed, so a film about the next iteration is legitimate and even elegant.
The problem is that it only works if you’ve read eight books. Everybody else is watching a fantasy film with no explanation of anything, and the detail that signals a whole cosmology to a reader is invisible to a viewer.
So the film satisfies neither audience. Newcomers get an underwritten quest, and readers get their cosmology referenced without being dramatized. Choosing to serve both is how it ended up serving neither.
The casting of Elba was the one bold decision and the discourse around it consumed most of the film’s advance attention. King defended it publicly and was right to, and the result is that the most interesting thing about the production was settled before anybody saw a frame.
Two Actors Doing Real Work
Elba plays Roland as a man who has been walking for a very long time and has nothing left except the job. The performance is right, restrained and physically credible, and the film gives him almost no scenes to be a person in. The reloading is the moment the whole production briefly works. Roland reloads at speed, repeatedly, in the middle of gunfights, and it’s presented as the defining skill of a gunslinger instead of a flourish. Somebody on this crew understood the character.
That reloading sequence is where I sat up. Elba handles those guns like a man who’s done it ten thousand times, and for a minute I could see the film this should have been. McConaughey is enjoying himself and pitched slightly differently from everything around him. Walter is casual, amused and lethal, and the actor is playing the seduction instead of the menace. That’s the correct reading of the character.
What defeats him is the writing. Walter’s power in the film is to give verbal instructions that people obey. That means his big moments are him saying a word and somebody dying, and there’s no way to stage that twelve times without it becoming comic. I felt sorry for McConaughey by the end. He’s clearly having fun, and the script turns him into a man who says “stop breathing” so often that I started laughing at scenes meant to scare me.
An antagonist whose ability is instant and verbal removes all tension from every scene he’s in. If he can end anybody by speaking, the story has to keep inventing reasons for him to decline.
Limit your villain’s power in a way the audience can see. A cost, a range, a preparation, a thing he can’t do. Unlimited power makes an antagonist a plot device with a face.
Notice that Elba’s reloading is the opposite case: a specific, bounded, physical skill, established visually, that the audience can watch him deploy under pressure. That’s why it’s the only thing anybody remembers.
What the Money Says
Sixty million dollars in production plus roughly six million in reshoots, so about sixty-six in total, against a hundred and thirteen million worldwide. It opened to nineteen million and fell away immediately.
By the strict arithmetic that’s not a catastrophe. Sony declined to spend more money defending a picture that was already in trouble, which is the disciplined decision, and the film didn’t become one of the decade’s great losses.
The bigger cost was strategic. This was intended as the first installment of a film and television franchise built on one of the largest bodies of work in American popular fiction, and it ended that plan on the first attempt. The development history explains a great deal. Universal and Ron Howard had planned a trilogy with a linked television series, the studio reduced the budget and then dropped it, and the version that reached screens is a smaller film assembled from the wreckage of a much larger intention.
Howard stayed on as a producer through the move to Sony. It tells you the plan survived the studio change and the money didn’t. A trilogy with a television arm became a single feature at sixty million dollars, and the ambition was never rescaled to match.
The Right Shape Was Always Television
King’s own view was that the mix of films and television might be the answer, and the material argues for it. Eight books with different genres, tones and time periods is a season structure.
Mike Flanagan, who has adapted King twice before and calls this his dream project, has since developed a five-season series. Whether it arrives is a separate question and the reasoning is sound.
That’s the lesson I take from the failure. Some source material has a shape, and the shape here is episodic, long and tonally varied. That describes a television series, and a ninety-five minute film is about the worst container anybody could have picked for it.
I don’t think the film is contemptible. It’s competent, brief and forgettable, made by people who couldn’t get the resources the material required. That’s a sadder outcome than incompetence and a more common one.
There’s one more thing worth saying for it. The film treats Roland’s exhaustion as real, gives Elba the space to play a man who has outlived his own purpose, and ends with him choosing to keep going anyway. Buried under the compression is somebody who understood what the books were about, and was never given the extra ninety minutes it would have taken to put even a part of it on the screen.
Match the form to the material before anything else. A sprawling episodic story compressed into a feature loses the thing that made it sprawl. That’s usually the thing readers loved.
The commercial pressure runs the other way, because a film is a single bet and a series is many. That pressure has produced most of the bad adaptations of the last twenty years.
For your own work: if somebody proposes a form that requires cutting your central structure, the answer is that they want a different story with your title on it. Sometimes that’s worth doing and you should know that’s what you’re agreeing to.
Should you watch The Dark Tower?
Only for Elba and McConaughey, and only if you haven’t read the books. It’s a 3 because two actors and one reloading sequence are all I got out of ninety-five minutes built from the wreckage of a much larger plan, and the people making the decisions left no room anywhere for the thing it was adapting. That’s inexcusable.
