Another Look at 'The Dark Tower'

Written by Mike Cervantes

The Dark Tower is a series of multi-genre fantasy novels written by Stephen King beginning in 1982. At its heart it is fantasy, yet it has western, horror, and science fiction elements, and given the age of its main protagonist, could also be considered Young Adult, but to the author itself it is the playground at the center of the tempest that is his fictional universe. It’s amazing that a series that, up to this point, has run parallel to the career of one of the most prolific authors of the modern day, is only now just getting a movie, but there’s an already established amount of caution mixed with that. For every truly admirable film version of one of King’s works you’ll find….well, the one where Bronson Pinchot is making angry faces at those cabbage demons that were also in Ren & Stimpy, or the one where Jason Lee is evoking Scooby-Doo to prevent his guts from being eaten by the thing that lives in the toilet.
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Ironically, though, the film version of The Dark Tower actually succeeds because of the digestibility of its story, and its obvious proximity to the mindset of the author himself. It’s not hard to put King in the same shoes as protagonist Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor), a twelve year old who mitigates the grief caused by the loss of his firefighter father through experiencing multiple nightmares, and then bringing them to reality in the form of pencil sketches. Those sketches, naturally coalescing into a larger narrative about a man in black named Walter (Matthew McConaughey) who seeks to destroy a giant dark tower that is holding together the fabric of multiple universes.

Then there is a lone avenger, the last of the line of famed gunslingers, Roland Deschain (Idris Elba), who now plainly seeks revenge against Walter for the destruction of his tribe. Then, as it is with all YA and fantasy narratives; this is all proven to be true, when a pair of Walter’s minions attempt to abduct Jake from his indifferent mother and step-father under the guise of mental help, leading him to uncover the mystery of the world that exists in his dream, inject justice back into the heart of Deschain, and once again protect The Dark Tower from the endless onslaught of those who would destroy it for the evulz.

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It’s really as simple as a genre movie like this gets. It is surely something you’ve seen a million times before, but what seems to be the saving grace of this film, is that it presents its material inexorably straight; from top to bottom only presenting us with the details without hitting us over the head as to why all this stuff seems important. When, in the end of the film’s second act, we eventually see our first monster, he appears to be nothing other than a black smoke cloud that predictably shifts into the form of Jake’s father.
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The same can be said about Walter, the ignominious Man in Black, and McConaughey’s portrayal of him. He seems to have magic powers that, at their base, induce hate in people, but mostly just provide for us the concept that this character is powerful, and certainly enough so to make Elba’s Deschain an underdog, along with his gunslinger brethren, be they samurai or Jedi, in the mind of the auteur. Then there’s Jake, who is at the center of this conflict because he has a ‘shine,’ or a psychic ability, actually strong enough to shatter The Dark Tower.

I wish there was more that could be said. Literally. I usually have about two-hundred more words for these reviews, but it is the nature of the book series on which it is based, coupled with the choices made in this adaptation of the book, which leaves the content portion of both this review, and the film it is based on, severely wanting. It’s a good film, and if you happened to catch it in theaters, you’d absolutely enjoy it, but what will come from this franchise, which is already seven stories long in book form, remains to be seen. As it is, it only stands to add to Stephen King’s legacy if Stephen King can successfully preach to us its significance. 

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