Hello darkness my old friend

It is a rare and fleeting occasion that a film based on a book does anything more than enrage fans and spark countless debates as to why things weren't included, how things looked different and why on earth would you cast that person in that role. Even highly praised translations like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings have a host of detractors who will absolutely not let you forget that they failed to capture everything in the novels and so therefore are worthy of nothing more than ridicule, bile and a heap of online abuse. It is of course, not the filmmakers fault that people are idiots; as much as I thought The Last Jedi was a fairly rancid take on the futures of some of the most beloved characters in movie history there is literally no excuse for hounding an actress so badly over the character she played that she felt she needed to quit social media just to avoid the constant hate. I might rag on movies a lot, but I'm never going to stoop to that level, it's pretty undignified. My point is that adapting a novel for film is a thankless task and you will literally never please everyone.

Case in point: Stephen King's The Dark Tower. Based on a series of seven books written in the 80's The Dark Tower novels are a hybrid of Westerns, Arthurian Legend and sprawling fantasy sagas such as Tolkien and is often cited as some of King's best work. It's been adapted to graphic novel but fans have been clamouring for a cinematic outing for this for a long old time. When they finally got it however most of them weren't terribly happy.

Just for the sake of full disclosure, I have only read the first book in the Dark Tower saga and honestly, I wasn't really impressed enough to go into the rest. I did do a bit of research into the rest of the story so I do at least know how everything fits together, but I think that's the biggest problem the film has; it's not actually an adaptation, it's a sequel. Now there's literally no way of explaining this without ruining the plot of the books, although in fairness they're the best part of 35 years old now so I don't feel bad about it in the least.

So from the research I did (Wikipedia, I'm not proud) the whole thing is set on multiple worlds linked by portals, Roland Deschain is the main protagonist and is the last of the descendants of King Arthur and is trekking across the desert to catch up with The Man in Black (whose real name is Walter but also Randall, I'll get back to that) so he can kill him and enter the Dark Tower. Along the way a bunch of stuff happens, including some fairly out-of-nowhere fourth wall breaking at the end (the characters implore Stephen King to write their stories down and Walter/Randall is the same guy who terrorises people in The Stand which does all sorts of weird things to the continuity) and it all leads to Roland getting to the Tower where he realises that he's doomed to repeat the whole thing over again but with no memory of the cycles that went before. So a bit like certain video games where you don't win, you just go round again with better stats and the Hand Lotion of Invincibility or whatever random item you got given for 73 days of gaming and carpal tunnel syndrome in your wrists. Which brings us back to the film.

As it stands, it's actually not a bad watch. There was the now predictable and inherently boring uproar surrounding the casting of Idris Elba as Roland because for some obscure reason some people still can't handle their main characters being anything other than white, but then there was a whole separate backlash because the film wasn't a word for word transcription of the first book. You can forgive the film makers to a certain extent, because explaining that this is another loop following from the books kind of ruins the books for those who haven't read them, but it's obviously a double-edged blade because you're now stuck with a movie that was expected to be an adaptation but isn't. You can't win, can you?

The best way to go into this movie is to ignore the fact there are any books at all, even if you've read them; if you do that, it isn't actually too bad. It shares its roots with fantasy classics like The Never-ending Story, and even The Dark Crystal although there aren't many similarities past the central premise. It is a touch predictable, almost like it got caught between making a movie for adult fans and the teenage audience and didn't know quite how to balance the two; there are some quite bleak moments where Walter uses his sorcery to literally stop people breathing or set themselves on fire which is pretty harrowing if you think about it too long, but a lot of it happens off camera to avoid that death mark PG 13 rating in the US so you aren't likely to traumatise too many 12 year olds. Roland is a decent hero, although I agree that the way he loads his guns is overly fancy and annoying, The Man in Black is a decent, if slightly over-powered foil who would have done better if he'd studied geometry perhaps and Jake is a not-too annoying young teen lead who actually doesn't spend too much time making stupid decisions which is refreshing. Considering quite a decent portion of the plot involves alternative worlds, everything is ironically a bit one-dimensional. It never really explains much about the Gunslingers save for a few snippets, nor does it go into why particularly Walter and Roland are doing the Batman/Joker arch-nemesis thing. We do find out Jake has The Shine, which ties this to The Shining somehow (either that's clever world-making or lazy idea production, who knows?) but we never see him develop his skills, other than a bit of deus ex machina; one minute he's a creepy troubled kid with nightmares, the next he's Captain Brain Powers, keeping portals open and terrifying mind draining machinery at bay with only and intense glare and difficult to decipher inner voice. Character arcs people, character arcs. The final showdown feels like we arrived at it too early and a bit more build up wouldn't have gone amiss, but if you've read the books (or the Wikipedia) you'll know that the Crimson King is still waiting in the wings somewhere but he only makes an appearance here in graffiti form and that's about it. They were very clearly angling for a sequel, which I suspect might have given us a bit more weight to the characters and possibly a bit more for the book fans to chew on but I think the appalling box office receipts have put paid to that endeavour, at least for now.

I can't say it was the best film I've watched but I didn't hate it. I can't help feeling this would have been so much better off as a Netflix or HBO series, properly adapting the books and really getting into depths with some of the characters. The book fans would have been happier at least.