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.