This movie seems overly complicated and unworthy of my full attention, so I’m immediately fiddling around with different things, multi-tasking with Netflix making noise in the background, Sean filling me in on important details he knows I’m inevitably missing.
I feel like the premise is this: somewhere in the universe there’s a dark tower which prevents dark (bad?) things from happening to us (more than they already do?). Its guardian is a gunslinger named Roland (Idris Elba). Its nemesis is a man who presumably also has a name but I keep just hearing him called The Man In Black (Matthew McConaughey). Oh, it’s Walter. Walter is a bad guy, I think. He and his cronies keep kidnapping children from Earth because apparently the tower can be toppled by the mind of a child, which seems deliberately obfuscating. Much like the word obfuscating. So they strap kids into a contraption that looks worrisomely like an electric chair, and it somehow concentrates a beam of their thoughts (?) onto the tower, which absorbs the damage. So far the tower remains upright, but every time it gets hit, Earth thinks it’s having an earthquake, and presumably the rest of the universe is feeling it too.
This whole thing is happening off-world but a peculiar kid by the name of Jake has been dreaming of it and isn’t overly surprised when he has to go on the lam from phony seam-faced psychiatric workers. He hides out in an abandoned building and Sean shouts “The wall just moved…like a dimensional portal.” [Insert Jay looking at Sean like ‘Oh, is there such a thing? An exact way a wall can “move” to “suggest” a “portal”?] And then a portal appears and the kid steps through because why the hell not, he’s 11 years old, time to get some hair on those balls, and now he’s on some parallel universe where his dream sketches have come alive [ugh dream sketches, such a tired trope].
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 
I quite like it, but then I do like Mr.Elba so that might be part of it.
LikeLike
They wanted to give us sooo so so much, and delivered so very little. I guess not even Steven King himself had a full plan about his book when he began writing it. Consequentely it was published in some magazine or newspaper or such and he just had to write more and more, without knowing how it all would end?
So I never felt tempted to read the novel when it was finally released. And when we watched the trainwreck movie we already had a bad feeling about it.
Sneakily trying to steal Jay’s readers:
https://orcaflotta.blog/2017/10/11/otm-the-dark-tower/
LikeLike
The Dark Tower was such a mess! I hated it, mostly because it did no justice to the King novels, which were brilliant and much more imaginative.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yeah, I bet actual fans of the novels were even more disappointed than I was.
LikeLike
I’m struggling to remember anything from this movie that I only watched it earlier this year. All I can recall is it being a lousy adaptation of some books that I adore.
LikeLike
Well you caught the gist.
LikeLike
My mother enjoyed the novels. But apparently there’s a lot of story there. No wonder the movie fell short.
LikeLike
I read all the Dark Tower novels from when I was young through my adult years. There is no way a single movie could capture it. Steven King even admitted this was an “alternate version” of the books he created. I’ve heard some rumors that there is going to be a Dark Tower series on a streaming service like Netflix. I hope so because that is a medium that could do it justice.
LikeLike
Sounds like I didn’t miss anything.
LikeLike
I like this actor….Idris Elba.
LikeLike
I sat stone-faced through the whole thing. Love Elba, don’t love the film.
LikeLike
Blaine the Pain. Enjoyed the novels. The movie munged it.
LikeLike
I sat through this a few months ago. I haven’t read the novels that it’s based on, but can only imagine they were less derivative than the movie version.
LikeLike
The books are much better well mostly. 🙂
LikeLike