It seems like there have been rumblings of a
Dark Tower adaptation for as long as my memory will allow me to recall, but never did it actually seem as if a feature film version of the material would make its way to the big screen. Well, here we are, the summer movie season of 2017 winding down and the feature film version of what is said to be Stephen King's magnum opus of sorts, his most expansive series to date which now consists of eight novels, 4,250 pages, and introduces concepts and characters from King's many other works that come into play as the series progresses has arrived. The first volume in the
The Dark Tower series, subtitled
The Gunslinger, was published in 1982 and comprised itself of five short stories that had been published between 1978 and 1981 to which those stories have now been condensed down into a 95-minute, PG-13 would-be blockbuster that never takes off in the way it would seem it was always destined to. Rather, director Nikolaj Arcel's (
A Royal Affair) tight, but exposition-heavy film suggests there is much mythology left to be explored, but for one reason or another it was decided the Cliff Notes version was the best way to go out of the gate so as to no doubt make the movie on the cheap and hopefully as accessible for the uninitiated as it would be pleasing to the fans who've been waiting on it for twenty-five years. Sure, the film makes sense in the way that point A leads to point B which inevitably leads to a CGI heavy point C, but never do we feel compelled by anything that's going on, invested in any of the characters taking part, nor-as one of those uninitiated members in the audience-do we care to see the series continue which one might think would have been the key to Sony finally ponying up and making a
Dark Tower movie in a current world of shared cinematic universes. Truthfully though, it kind of fails to emphasize this factor at all. In many ways one wants to commend the studio for telling a more contained story rather than baiting viewers with tease after tease so that they have to come back for a sequel to see what they really wanted to see the first time around, but at the same time fans also want to see what they imagined while reading the source material come to life in a good movie and whether or not
The Dark Tower is that is what's up for debate.
The Dark Tower is not necessarily a bad movie, but it's not very good either. It's very much a middle of the road affair; not bad enough to hate, but not good enough to remember. Let's put it this way: the best thing you can say about
The Dark Tower is that it's competent and the worst thing you can say is that it's uninspired.
