I Watch Films: The Dark Tower

The Dark Tower is a seven volume Steven King Fantasy series that begins as him riffing off Westerns and the Lord of the Rings at the same time, turns into a look at King’s own body of work and also life (including a relatively unflattering self-insert as one of the beams holding up the universe) and ends up a bit of a mess, but a weird and interesting one. That’s not this film.

Jake Chambers is a boy from New York on Keystone Earth with strange dreams of a gunslinger and a man in black. Roland of the line of Eld is the last gunslinger (probably) anywhere in the universe, and is chasing The Man in Black, Walter the Sorcerer. Walter in turn is looking for a child with great Shine (psychic strength) that he can use to destroy the Dark Tower and let in the darkness and fire from outside the universe.

It a Dark Tower flavoured Young Adult adventure. There’s a few cool gunslinger moves, though as many films have characters with great gun-fu it’s his reloading of his revolvers that makes most impact. Roland has the instant reload perk is what I’m saying.

So anyway this a perfectly good portal fantasy adventure film, lightly seasoned with Dark Tower flavouring, and missing out most of the more interesting and, well, darker bits of the books. And I say this even though several people die. It doesn’t really tread a lot of new ground.

Watch This: For a fun adventure with a tiny bit of grit to it.
Don’t Watch This: If you want the Dark Tower novels up on screen