As I've gone through reactions to Nikolaj Arcel's The Dark Tower, a film adaptation that was meant to start a new franchise for Sony (until it flopped at the box office), I've come to the realization that there seems to be a distinct split between people who have read the books and those who have not. Pretty much everybody agrees that this is a bad film, but the fans seem to be expressing a unique kind of disappointment. Here's something worth mentioning- I knew almost nothing about Stephen King's Dark Tower series going into this movie. The extent of my knowledge comes from a few people that I follow on Twitter, and even that hadn't really helped me understand this series in a significant fashion. I knew that it was a kind of weird western/sci-fi/fantasy hybrid, a battle between good and evil that takes place in a universe called Midworld. And I knew that the books contained connections to the work of King as a whole. That's pretty much it. I've read a few novels from the famous author, but I've just never touched anything related to his indescribable magnum opus.
What I found most surprising about The Dark Tower was the fact that I knew as much about this universe at the start of this movie as I did when the lights went up 94 minutes later. This film should have served as the primer to King's universe for a newcomer like me- instead, it's just a generic mess that feels like a massive wasted opportunity. Surprisingly, this thing doesn't get off to a bad start- the foundation is clearly there for an interesting adventure movie. But like so many other films coming out in this new Hollywood era of blockbusters-by-committee, The Dark Tower loses its momentum in a flash as its archetypal parts unravel in a tangled mess. After hearing so much about how King's utterly indescribable universe could never be properly adapted to the big screen, I was stunned to find something so basic, so bland, so thoroughly uninteresting on every single level. The Dark Tower may only be 95 minutes in length, but this is undoubtedly one of the most painfully empty action flicks of the year so far. If the goal was to create a good standalone project and a good introduction to King's expansive world, this film fails on both counts.
In The Dark Tower, Earth is being shaken by a series of earthquakes that nobody can really explain. Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) believes that the rumbles are directly related to his elaborate dreams, nightmares that involve a gunslinger, a man in black, and a tower. Everyone thinks that Jake is crazy, blaming his night terrors on the recent death of his father. Jake's mother (Katheryn Winnick) has the most sympathy for him, but she eventually agrees to send him to an institutional seminar that may help. But, unbeknownst to Mrs. Chambers and her despicable new husband, the seminar is run by soldiers of the Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey), a malevolent force of pure evil who believes Jake can help him take down the Dark Tower. The Man in Black's soldiers are like rats with human skin and supersized abilities, two things that are never explained. In his attempt to escape, Jake winds up tracking down a portal to Midworld, the land where his fantasies actually exist.
Midworld is desert landscape, and there are enough hints in the movie for me to assume that it's some kind of dystopian version of Earth- which means the portals are time travel devices, I guess?? I don't know, there isn't much in this movie that makes sense, or even if it is based in some logic, it's poorly explained. Anyways, when Jake gets to Midworld, he eventually meets Roland (Idris Elba), the last of the Gunslingers and the hero from his dream. The Gunslingers are an ancient order of knights (cowboy Jedis) sworn to protect the tower from evil, but the Man in Black ultimately eliminated many of them, including Roland's father (Dennis Haysbert). Roland is initially skeptical of Jake, but he becomes convinced of his abilities and warms up to the kid, seeing him as an essential player in the fight to take down Walter (the Man in Black's real name). Even with danger around every turn, Roland and Jake will fight to protect our world from a certain fate of total annihilation.
For a film with such massive, apocalyptic stakes, The Dark Tower never even comes close to making the audience feel a palpable sense of danger. This film is completely uninspired at every turn, a problem that extends to every aspect of the production. The world will probably never know the full extent of Sony's meddling in the directorial process of this film, but even if the whole thing didn't feel so truncated and incomplete, it would still suffer from a serious lack of imagination and visual energy. The Danish director Nikolaj Arcel has been behind the camera for an Oscar-nominated film before, but none of those directorial chops are on display here. The universe of The Dark Tower on the page is supposedly distinct and inventive- here, it's muddy and dull, devoid of anything that could make it stand out or stick in the mind of the audience. When it comes to the production values of this film- the effects, Junkie XL's score, the cinematography- everything is simply unremarkable.
And beyond the hopelessly bland filmmaking on display, The Dark Tower also wastes the immense talents of its stars on roles that are well below their pay grade. The Man in Black is such a one note villain, lacking any clear motivation beyond the fact that he's just a mean man. McConaughey is operating in full-on caricature mode, and while I'm not sure if the villain has more nuance in the novels, I have to believe that there's more than what's on screen. But the character problems don't solely lie on McConaughey's soldiers- even the consistently terrific Idris Elba can't turn Roland into an interesting protagonist. Roland's character arc is paper thin, and the mythology behind the Gunslingers is so vague that you basically have to make your own assumptions. Taylor's Jake Chambers is a somewhat interesting fish-out-of-water lead, but it's clear that the film runs out of things for him to do by the time the first act is finished.
If you want to point to the source of many of these issues, you can trace it all back to the script, a hodgepodge that is ultimately credited as being the product of Arcel, Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, and Anders Thomas Jensen. Pulling off a film like this is a tricky proposition- you have to introduce the audience to a brand new world, give them interesting characters to care about, and keep them engaged with a story that doesn't feel derivative. Seriously, it isn't easy to write these things. But The Dark Tower is perhaps a textbook example of how not to establish a new cinematic universe on the big screen, so sloppy in its approach to the popular source material that it feels like nobody really even cares. I'm not exaggerating when I say that this film does just about nothing right, and it feels so misshapen that it joins the esteemed ranks of King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Suicide Squad as blockbusters that feels like full-length trailers. But miraculously, The Dark Tower is more tediously soul-sucking than both of those fiascoes combined. It's profoundly dull.
I find it rather amusing to think that Sony felt the need to tone down the more complicated elements of the mythology. Of course, this was widely considered to be the reason for the re-shoots and the abruptly short runtime, something that indicated trouble well before the film even hit theaters. But in a landscape where millions of people are watching Game of Thrones each week, why do we assume that complex fantasy concepts can't be a hit with audiences? Judging by what's on the screen here though, I struggle to see any outcome where this film ended up being good. It's such basic blockbuster filmmaking in every way, so egregiously generic that it fails to display even the slightest amount of cinematic inspiration. Maybe The Dark Tower will find a second wind on television, but this could end up being a seriously damaging event for the property. This film has many flaws, but perhaps its worst mistake is that it failed to make me care about this universe- I have no interest in taking another trip to Midworld. As a movie, The Dark Tower is very bad, but as the introduction to an ambitious, unique world, it is absolutely disastrous.
THE FINAL GRADE: D+ (4.5/10)
In The Dark Tower, Earth is being shaken by a series of earthquakes that nobody can really explain. Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) believes that the rumbles are directly related to his elaborate dreams, nightmares that involve a gunslinger, a man in black, and a tower. Everyone thinks that Jake is crazy, blaming his night terrors on the recent death of his father. Jake's mother (Katheryn Winnick) has the most sympathy for him, but she eventually agrees to send him to an institutional seminar that may help. But, unbeknownst to Mrs. Chambers and her despicable new husband, the seminar is run by soldiers of the Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey), a malevolent force of pure evil who believes Jake can help him take down the Dark Tower. The Man in Black's soldiers are like rats with human skin and supersized abilities, two things that are never explained. In his attempt to escape, Jake winds up tracking down a portal to Midworld, the land where his fantasies actually exist.
Midworld is desert landscape, and there are enough hints in the movie for me to assume that it's some kind of dystopian version of Earth- which means the portals are time travel devices, I guess?? I don't know, there isn't much in this movie that makes sense, or even if it is based in some logic, it's poorly explained. Anyways, when Jake gets to Midworld, he eventually meets Roland (Idris Elba), the last of the Gunslingers and the hero from his dream. The Gunslingers are an ancient order of knights (cowboy Jedis) sworn to protect the tower from evil, but the Man in Black ultimately eliminated many of them, including Roland's father (Dennis Haysbert). Roland is initially skeptical of Jake, but he becomes convinced of his abilities and warms up to the kid, seeing him as an essential player in the fight to take down Walter (the Man in Black's real name). Even with danger around every turn, Roland and Jake will fight to protect our world from a certain fate of total annihilation.
For a film with such massive, apocalyptic stakes, The Dark Tower never even comes close to making the audience feel a palpable sense of danger. This film is completely uninspired at every turn, a problem that extends to every aspect of the production. The world will probably never know the full extent of Sony's meddling in the directorial process of this film, but even if the whole thing didn't feel so truncated and incomplete, it would still suffer from a serious lack of imagination and visual energy. The Danish director Nikolaj Arcel has been behind the camera for an Oscar-nominated film before, but none of those directorial chops are on display here. The universe of The Dark Tower on the page is supposedly distinct and inventive- here, it's muddy and dull, devoid of anything that could make it stand out or stick in the mind of the audience. When it comes to the production values of this film- the effects, Junkie XL's score, the cinematography- everything is simply unremarkable.
And beyond the hopelessly bland filmmaking on display, The Dark Tower also wastes the immense talents of its stars on roles that are well below their pay grade. The Man in Black is such a one note villain, lacking any clear motivation beyond the fact that he's just a mean man. McConaughey is operating in full-on caricature mode, and while I'm not sure if the villain has more nuance in the novels, I have to believe that there's more than what's on screen. But the character problems don't solely lie on McConaughey's soldiers- even the consistently terrific Idris Elba can't turn Roland into an interesting protagonist. Roland's character arc is paper thin, and the mythology behind the Gunslingers is so vague that you basically have to make your own assumptions. Taylor's Jake Chambers is a somewhat interesting fish-out-of-water lead, but it's clear that the film runs out of things for him to do by the time the first act is finished.
If you want to point to the source of many of these issues, you can trace it all back to the script, a hodgepodge that is ultimately credited as being the product of Arcel, Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, and Anders Thomas Jensen. Pulling off a film like this is a tricky proposition- you have to introduce the audience to a brand new world, give them interesting characters to care about, and keep them engaged with a story that doesn't feel derivative. Seriously, it isn't easy to write these things. But The Dark Tower is perhaps a textbook example of how not to establish a new cinematic universe on the big screen, so sloppy in its approach to the popular source material that it feels like nobody really even cares. I'm not exaggerating when I say that this film does just about nothing right, and it feels so misshapen that it joins the esteemed ranks of King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Suicide Squad as blockbusters that feels like full-length trailers. But miraculously, The Dark Tower is more tediously soul-sucking than both of those fiascoes combined. It's profoundly dull.
I find it rather amusing to think that Sony felt the need to tone down the more complicated elements of the mythology. Of course, this was widely considered to be the reason for the re-shoots and the abruptly short runtime, something that indicated trouble well before the film even hit theaters. But in a landscape where millions of people are watching Game of Thrones each week, why do we assume that complex fantasy concepts can't be a hit with audiences? Judging by what's on the screen here though, I struggle to see any outcome where this film ended up being good. It's such basic blockbuster filmmaking in every way, so egregiously generic that it fails to display even the slightest amount of cinematic inspiration. Maybe The Dark Tower will find a second wind on television, but this could end up being a seriously damaging event for the property. This film has many flaws, but perhaps its worst mistake is that it failed to make me care about this universe- I have no interest in taking another trip to Midworld. As a movie, The Dark Tower is very bad, but as the introduction to an ambitious, unique world, it is absolutely disastrous.
THE FINAL GRADE: D+ (4.5/10)
Comments
Post a Comment