belated review: "The Dark Tower" and "It"

The "Dark Tower" book series has been posited by many fans and critics, as well as Stephen King himself, to be, in many ways, King's magnum opus. It's a colossal undertaking, and an epic in a very literal sense, spanning decades in its publication. Any film adaptation was bound to disappoint fans. But that's the way it always is with literary adaptation, and King's work in particular has always been alternately the very epitome of that old "the book was better" cliche, and the exception that disproves the rule.

As a film, The Dark Tower has been a troubled production from the git-go, with multiple directors, production companies, and screenplay drafts coming and going. I don't know how awful the earlier scripts had to be for them to settle on this one, though.

The book series tells the story of Roland Deschain, ostensibly a wanderer in the Old West, but who is gradually revealed by the first book to be the last in a long line of heroes whose ancestry traces back all the way to King Arthur himself -- or at least an "alternative world" version of Arthur. The books are a mind-bending blend of fantasy and Western, with elements from other genres occasionally sneaking in as well. The book series gradually reveals the alternative world's complex relationship with our own, as Roland, originally very much a loner, slowly builds a band of fellow travelers and friends bound together by destiny -- a "ka-tet," as people in Roland's world call it. Roland's dual quest: to find the mythical Dark Tower, purported to be the center of all the universes, and also to avenge an at-first-unestablished wrong perpetrated by the mysterious villain known as the Man in Black.

The movie does a switcheroo, relegating Roland to supporting-role status, and instead focusing on one of the central supporting characters from the book series, a boy from our world named Jake Chambers. The book's method of getting Jake to Mid-World -- Roland's universe -- is admittedly harsh. The boy is killed in our world, and mysteriously wakes up in Roland's, for reasons that have nothing to do with how the afterlife is supposed to work (even within the context of the books) and more to do with destiny.

Perhaps not wanting to be so depressing, the writers of the movie decided to find a very different way to connect Jake's and Roland's stories. They turn Jake into a developing psychic, who learns of Roland and his quest via dreams.

Now, this is no small change. In the movie, Jake is not only a psychic, but, according to many people in the dialogue, perhaps the most powerful psychic who has ever lived. In the books, he's not a psychic at all. (Well, eventually, sort of, but only in a very limited way, and  even then still sort of not psychic at all. It's thousands of pages worth of complicated.)

Okay, so a major change, but I believe that changes can and maybe even should be made to a story if it's going to make for a better movie. But this change made for The Dark Tower is not one of those circumstances. Making Jake a psychic is less about telling a good story and much more about the filmmakers' apparent desire to tap into the current superhero movie trend that has been dominating the box office.

That's not just a theory of mine. The filmmakers are not subtle at all in wanting to turn "The Dark Tower" into a superhero story. In addition to giving Jake psychic abilities, they make Roland's prowess with firearms supernatural in its extent, and they turn the villainous Man in Black/ Walter O'Dim into a master of both mind control and telekinesis. There's also an extended superhero battle between one of Walter's henchmen and Roland, in which the two characters throw each other off of rooftops and through buildings, like they're General Zod and Superman duking it out in Metropolis. Their super strength and invulnerability come out of nowhere and are never explained by anything in the story. As I mentioned, the only explanation is that the filmmakers wanted a superhero battle.

It's worth mentioning at this point that the books have absolutely nothing to do with superheroes. If the filmmakers wanted to make a movie about superheroes, surely no one was stopping them. Why take characters from a highly popular book series and turn them into superheroes -- and then never provide any story-based explanation for their abilities? It makes no sense, not on any level other than "we're cashing in on a trend, screw the storyline, and screw you, anyone who watches this."

Meanwhile, the Man in Black watches and occasionally manipulates events from his science fictiony, high-tech watchtower headquarters (not the Dark Tower, another random tower, apparently). Among the gadgets at Walter's disposal are supercomputers, teleportation devices, and more, and it's worth mentioning at this point that the books have absolutely nothing to do with science fictiony headquarters.

The result of all of this is nothing less than a mess, and perhaps the biggest mystery of all is exactly who this movie is intended for. People familiar with the story will be outraged at the pointless changes, while people unfamiliar with the story will be largely clueless as to the lack of explanation of most of what's going on on the screen.

Could The Dark Tower have been greatly improved by at least an attempt to be loyal to the book? Without question. Still, it takes more than loyalty to a source to make a good adaptation. Take It, another 2017 movie adapting a beloved Stephen King book, for example. By the letter, It is actually quite faithful to much of the book, telling the story of seven kids who band together to fight a demonic clown named Pennywise. Much of the storyline and even many of the individual scenes follow the book quite closely.

And yet . . . something is definitely very off with Andy Muschietti's adaptation. While certainly nowhere close to the scope of "The Dark Tower," King's book It is well over a thousand pages long, and clearly supposed to be an epic as well. That sense is lost in the movie, which presents itself more like a dangerous but summertime adventure that will be forgotten by the start of next school year. Personally, I was also greatly annoyed by the fact that the screenwriters took characters that King had taken pains to make highly individualized, and here made them generic "movie kids," who are so interchangeable in the film that they're distinguishable from each other only by the most blandly, insultingly superficial characteristics imaginable. (One's the fat kid, one's the tomboy, one's the stutterer, one's the black kid, etc.)

King, of course, watched both The Dark Tower and It and put his official stamp of approval on both of them, expressing admiration and enthusiasm. But that's meaningless, because with the infamous exception of The Shining*, he always does that, regardless of the movie's quality. I can't understand why. It's not like he needs the money from a box office success. The rest of the adaptations of his work could universally be flops for all time, and he'll still have more money than you or I could ever imagine. Personally, I can't imagine going to such trouble to write such good books with such passion, and then watching them turned into exercises in tedium like It or incompetence and incomprehension like The Dark Tower.

*One nice tidbit in The Dark Tower: In a scene in which a therapist tries to convince Jake that he's not psychic, there's a picture of The Shining's Overlook Hotel in the background.

P.S. When Imagine Entertainment first announced that black actor Idris Elba was cast as The Dark Tower's Roland, there was a big brouhaha over race. People were divided into two camps, those objecting because Roland was originally depicted as white, and those accusing the first party as having no reason behind their objections other than racism. Personally, I had a problem with a black man playing Roland, but not because of racism. I could totally get behind Elba as James Bond. Wanna reboot Indiana Jones with Donald Glover in the role? Sure, why not? A black Holmes or Watson? Kind of an odd idea, considering the time period, but I'm okay with it. But with Roland, his physical characteristics are not only featured in illustrations, they're not only described in the text, but they actually turn out to be a plot point, as characters note his resemblance to Stephen King, which turns out to be of some significance later on. My objection was based on the fact that any adaptation would have to throw that entire subplot out the window.

However, after seeing how very little the movie has anything to do with the events depicted in the books, my objection has become moot. Elba is very good in the role, and Matthew McConaughey is decent as the villain. They are not anywhere close to being good enough to save the movie. Barring a complete re-write, no one possibly could be.

Whatever Happened To . . . .

I once read an interview with Stephen King (I falsely remembered that it was in the introduction to the re-release of The Stand, but when I double-checked in preparation for the this blog entry, I found that I was wrong) in which King half chuckled and half griped that his fans often ask him whatever happened to his characters after the story ended.

I can understand both the gripe and the chuckle. On the one hand, getting only minor variations of the same question over and over again must surely get annoying. On the other hand, it's the highest compliment that King has managed to create characters so believable that even people who know better on one level, who know that the characters are fictional, can't help but think of the them as real people, still out there, somewhere, maybe living happily ever after, maybe struggling to survive.

The best fiction writing does that. The book or the movie or the TV series ends, and we're left wondering, "but then what . . . "

I'm not talking about confusing or unsatisfying endings. Nor am I talking about "open-ended" endings that really just present limited options. (The infamous ending of The Sopranos feels open-ended, but it's really presenting only two basic scenarios: Does Tony Soprano get murdered after the cut to black -- or not?) I'm not talking about endings at all. I'm talking about characters who are so entertaining and fully fleshed out, that they seem to defy the very concept of endings. And in light of my introductory paragraph, I'll start with the most obvious example. Beware: Spoilers abound.

1. The Stand: Stephen King is, for my money, the one author who manages to pull off this hat trick on a regular basis. Personally, I think a combination of his popularity and his subject matter makes King vastly under-rated as a serious author. One hundred years from now, he will be studied as a prolific author of "the classics," just like Faulkner and Twain are studied today. One of King's greatest strengths is his ability to present believable, three-dimensional characters, and you can take almost any of his better books (there are a lot of them) and imagine the characters living lives after the official story ends. But I understand why people ask him about The Stand most of all.

For those of you unfamiliar with the novel, it concerns the End of Civilization as We Know It, due to the accidental release of "the superflu," an artificially engineered disease that wipes out 99.4% of humanity. The survivors are instinctively drawn to two seemingly random locations: The "good guys" are drawn to Boulder, Colorado, where they form a new democracy, and the "bad guys" instinctively migrate to Las Vegas, Nevada, ruled by the ruthless, supernatural, and villainous Randall Flagg. While the novel does draw strong moral lines in the sand, its good guy/ bad guy dynamic often refuses to paint its characters in moral black and white. Some of the good guys are flawed, some of the bad guys struggle with conscience, and some characters are aware that they seem out of place in both locations.

If you haven't read the book, I highly suggest you set aside the time to do so. (The novel is indeed epic in length, so set aside a lot of time.) SPOILER: The book ends on several intriguing notes. After the destruction of Vegas, the sole remaining concentration of civilization is the new democratic republic, the Boulder Free Zone, and there is a strong implication that the once struggling new settlement will continue to thrive. Even as survivors of the superflu continue to trickle into Boulder, some of the  relatively longer-term residents consider the pros and cons of leaving again. Who leaves? Who stays? How does the Boulder Free Zone, and its ruling "Free Zone Committee" evolve over time? Those who decide to leave are surely committing themselves to lives of seclusion. How does that work out for them?

One implication of the ending that I'm surprised I've never heard about anywhere: Nearly the entire criminal element of humanity either died from the superflu or was killed in the explosion in Vegas. Does that mean that the Boulder Free Zone is essentially a utopia now? Or will the uglier side of humanity eventually rear its head once again?

2. Forever: Contrary to the ambitious title, this show lasted only one season, and told the story of Doctor Henry Morgan, an immortal born in the year 1779, who stopped aging in his late thirties and is still alive and well today, working as a medical examiner for the New York Police Department. Dr. Morgan is gifted not only with immortality -- a condition known only by his adopted son -- but also with a Sherlockian-level of observation and deduction, making him an invaluable assett to the various murder cases that come before his precinct. Dr. Morgan was played with Holmesian flair by Ioan Gruffud, and supporting actors/ characters included Joel David Moore as his assistant in the medical lab, Judd Hirsch as his mortal son, Alana de Garza as love interest and the police detective who keeps coming up with excuses to take him along on investigations, and Burn Gorman as the mysterious , villainous, fellow immortal "Adam."

Most episodes were standard, Law and Order style police procedurals. Although not officially a detective, Dr. Morgan often helped out on the cases much more than most ME's do, due to both his Holmesian powers of deduction and also his centuries of accumulated knowledge. Flashbacks to earlier periods of Dr. Morgan's life often either mirrored current events or illustrated how he came by whatever knowledge he finds useful in the latest case.

SPOILER: In the series finale, Dr. Morgan finally finds a way to eliminate Adam as a threat -- without killing him -- and decides to reveal his secret to his love interest and police partner, Detective Jo Martinez. BUT THEN WHAT?!??

Considering the nature of Dr. Morgan's condition (Adam's theory of the one thing that kill both immortals is disproven; it appears that both characters are truly immortal after all) this show could have gone on for years, but ratings decided differently.

3. Homicide: Life on the Street: Many of the characters of Homicide, especially those in the first few seasons, were closely (to varying degrees) based on real-life people. But that doesn't mean we know what eventually happened to the fictional equivalents.

If you haven't seen the show, it's an adaptation of David Simon's non-fiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. While many of the cases and storylines were invented by TV writers, many others were based very closely (as opposed to Law and Order's massively altered "ripped from the headlines" cases) on actual events in the lives and careers of the early 90s homicide division of the Baltimore Police Department.

Homicide: The Movie aired one year after the series proper had ended. Some of the characters were still working homicide. Some were still cops but had transferred to other departments. At least two -- Stanley "Stan the Big Man" Bolander (Ned Beatty) and breakout character Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) -- had retired. Stan Bolander had fully retired, while Pembleton was working as a college professor.

There is one character whose continuing fate we already know: That of Detective John Munch, who transferred to the New York City Special Victims Unit, and continued to be played by Richard Belzer for decades on Law and Order: S.V.U. In Belzer/ Munch's farewell Law & Order episode as a regular character, Munch has a retirement party, and we're treated with very brief cameos from three different characters from Homicide: Billie Lou Hatfield, Detective Meldrick Lewis, and Gwen Munch. Between the three of them, they have only one line (when Meldrick shouts out a good-natured joke at Munch's expense). I wanted to see more, but it was nice to see that 13 years after the end of Homicide, these characters hadn't been forgotten -- at least, not entirely.

SPOILER: Homicide was very much an ensemble show, but the two characters who formed the heart of the series were Pembleton and his partner, Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor). In the series finale, Bayliss, while off screen, murders serial killer Luke Ryland, who had used legal technicalities to evade justice. At the end of the TV movie, Bayliss risks ruining his friendship with Pembleton by confessing this crime to him, despite Pembleton's statement that, psychologically, he just couldn't take even one more confession. Does the friendship survive?

Note to TV producers: Twenty years is a sort of standard prison sentence for murder, at least on TV. It's been almost exactly that long since Bayliss confessed to the murder of Luke Ryland. How cool would it be to use Bayliss's return to society as an excuse to catch up with these old characters -- and include a scene where Bayliss is released from prison and is picked up by none other than his old friend and partner, Frank Pembleton?

4. The West Wing: This TV series sort of takes place in an alternate reality -- not in any fantasy or science fiction manner, but in this alternate reality, we never had presidents George Bush, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Jr., or Barack Obama; we had presidents D. Wire Newman, Owen Lassiter, Jed Bartlet, and Matthew Santos. Further, President Bartlet makes two predictions about his own staff members eventually becoming president: Sam Seaborn and Charlie Young. Do his predictions ever come true? Barring a canonical return to these characters, we'll never know. But I'd sure like to find out!

All entries on this list gave us tantalizing glimpses into the future for their respective narratives. The characters from Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" cross over into the world of The Stand, but never encounters any of that novel's characters. Law & Order: S.V.U. gave us the one-line cameo of  Homicide's Meldrick Lewis. But The West Wing really gave us a true glimpse into the characters' futures, thanks to a one-scene flash-forward at the start of the final season. Thus, we find out that C.J. marries Danny Concannon, Kate becomes a published author, Will is a congressman on the Ways and Means Committee, and Toby Ziegler and Jed Bartlet have put aside their differences and renewed their friendship. But then what happened? And what of Josh, who appears in the flash forward but without any detail about his current status? What of Sam, who doesn't appear in the flash forward at all? What of Bartlet's predictions about Charlie and Sam eventually becoming Presidents of the United States?

What book, movie, or show has you wondering what happened to your favorite characters later on?