#646 – Dark Tower (2017)

Dark Tower (2017)

Film review #646

Director: Nikolaj Arcel

SYNOPSIS: Jake Chambers is having dreams about another world in which a Gunslinger tries to stop the Man in Black form destroying a tower and thus the world. When some workers from a psychiatric ward come to take him, he recognises them wearing human skins like in his dreams, and manages to flee through a portal to the world in his dreams. There, he meets the Gunslinger, and the two of them attempt to bring down the man in Black before he can finish off both of their worlds…

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Dark Tower is a 2017 film and an adaptation of Steven King’s series of novels of the same name. The story revolves around Jake Chambers, an ordinary schoolboy who has strange dreams about a ruined world and a gun-wielding man facing off against a Man in Black. When he discovers that the world is all too real, he teams up with the Gunslinger to save both his world and theirs. Emerging from a troubled production which saw the rights for the film passed between a number of studios and directors, the film takes the eight book series and condenses it into a just over ninety minute film. It should be evident that this comes fraught with problems. I have never read the books, but I am aware that the whole series is full of lore and worldbuilding, and the main issue with this film is that it has very little, and clumsily establishes what it has to before it rushes off onto the next plot point. I’m sure that there is an interesting world and mechanics in this story, but there’s no time taken to build or present it. The film throws the story into a typical three-act structure that again just skims over any worldbuilding and relies on the typical movie structure to carry the story through. First, we get Jake thrown into the Gunslinger’s world, then we get the Gunslinger thrown into Jake’s world with a typical fish-out-of-water experience in a very typical New York City setting, and then we get the finale. There’s no room for anything special or unique. Even if you want to make the argument that it isn’t trying to faithfully adapt the novels and just do its own thing with the material, it doesn’t do that either: it just slots it into this very formulaic structure.

The only thing real highlights of the film are Idris Elba’s performance as the Gunslinger, and some of the action scenes are quite nice. The rest of the characters don’t really offer anything interesting. Matthew McConaughey as the Man in Black with his ability to do just about anything is very flavourless. I a sense, I understand how this film became such a mess with it’s constant handing off to different people, meaning that any vision of it has been rewritten and dissected so nothing coherent remains. Even so, condensing such an obviously lore-heavy series into a film that barely stretches ninety minutes is evidently going to be fraught with problems without serious reworking: the solution the film finds to this is to shove it into a very typical structure that barely keeps it afloat in place of any worldbuilding. And it is the serious lack of worldbuilding that hampers this film: there’s no sense of place, setting, or consequence that makes anything matter. Dark Tower has some good moments, but barely coherent storytelling and worldbuilding leaves it a mess of a film.