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Late to The Dark Tower
Feb. 23rd, 2019 11:59 pmFinally, belatedly watched the film adaptation of The Dark Tower - really a mashup of bits from various novels, plus some stuff that IIRC never happened in the books, presumably needed to hold the rest together. I was relaxed about it being a rather free adaptation, and only began to worry a bit when I heard that they'd gutted it in editing; it seemed like one of those productions where people can't agree what it's about and, as R put it earlier, they settle that by making sure there's as little of it as possible. I've often advocated for shorter running times (behold the economy of a good 1940s film, and imagine it being applied to much of today's output), but an hour and a half was both more of this than I wanted and far less than it would have needed for us to actually care about the characters.
The biggest problem is that this needed to be a TV series, and fortunately there is an Amazon series in the works. Currently IMDb lists it for 2020, but that must be when production begins rather than an airdate, because all the news stories that reference it are "It's not dead!" ones. (I'm giving this fandom a tag in the hope that we will end up with a TV series worth discussing, and because it would be fun to re-read the books and talk about them.) Anyway, TDT is clearly a book series that is made for TV rather than film: like Game of Thrones before it, it needs and deserves time to spread out and appreciate its expansive world, deep charactersation and accumulation of lore, much of which echoes Stephen King's other work. Also, I think that the appeal of his writing lies very much in his style: he can be breathtakingly crude, colloquial in a way that rings true, and touching, sometimes all on the same page. Tone is a hard thing to translate to the screen when long passages of the books have Roland alone, but I believe it can be done.
The film is trying, in both senses. Idris Elba is a good choice for Roland; he's a man who can convey a wearying personal history with a look. But what we get of that history is so slim that even the litany of gunslingers, though moving in the books, rings as cheesy here when used to tie together the fact that our two barely-known protagonists have shit to work through re: their dead fathers. Though I have to say that even as a fan of the books who weirdly enjoyed that aspect of the books, it's also a very unfortunate cultural moment for an American film to have a man handing a boy a gun and telling him that working with it will make him feel better. A lot of emotional work has to be done by that scene, and the one where Roland comforts Jake about his mother's violent death. Otherwise, it all feels like it's on fast-forward. We don't get any visceral sense of why we should care about the Tower - yes, we're told our world is threatened along with the multiverse, but they tell us that in every other SFF film.
A TV series will have the chance to let the story breathe, and above all to develop the sense of Roland's absolute obsession with the Tower, and the sense of looming existential threat. It can slowly unfold the sense of a world that has "moved on"; a post-apocalyptic society grinding to a halt, where everyone has some degree of radiation poisoning (one enigmatic hint the film didn't have time to explore), where scarcity is absolute. The film shows Roland with a belt full of bullets, but part of the genius of the books was to make every bullet count, because it has been scavenged for, and because firing it now will mean not having it later, and having no way of knowing when or if there'll be more. And that's why Roland can be so staggered by simple things like Coca Cola, or aspirin; his body has never known refined sugar or modern medicine.
I think that shows like Preacher, Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones all have qualities of atmosphere, tone, worldbuilding and production values that would make for a really good adaptation of The Dark Tower. It doesn't have to be identical to the books, but it does need to import what made them compelling.
The biggest problem is that this needed to be a TV series, and fortunately there is an Amazon series in the works. Currently IMDb lists it for 2020, but that must be when production begins rather than an airdate, because all the news stories that reference it are "It's not dead!" ones. (I'm giving this fandom a tag in the hope that we will end up with a TV series worth discussing, and because it would be fun to re-read the books and talk about them.) Anyway, TDT is clearly a book series that is made for TV rather than film: like Game of Thrones before it, it needs and deserves time to spread out and appreciate its expansive world, deep charactersation and accumulation of lore, much of which echoes Stephen King's other work. Also, I think that the appeal of his writing lies very much in his style: he can be breathtakingly crude, colloquial in a way that rings true, and touching, sometimes all on the same page. Tone is a hard thing to translate to the screen when long passages of the books have Roland alone, but I believe it can be done.
The film is trying, in both senses. Idris Elba is a good choice for Roland; he's a man who can convey a wearying personal history with a look. But what we get of that history is so slim that even the litany of gunslingers, though moving in the books, rings as cheesy here when used to tie together the fact that our two barely-known protagonists have shit to work through re: their dead fathers. Though I have to say that even as a fan of the books who weirdly enjoyed that aspect of the books, it's also a very unfortunate cultural moment for an American film to have a man handing a boy a gun and telling him that working with it will make him feel better. A lot of emotional work has to be done by that scene, and the one where Roland comforts Jake about his mother's violent death. Otherwise, it all feels like it's on fast-forward. We don't get any visceral sense of why we should care about the Tower - yes, we're told our world is threatened along with the multiverse, but they tell us that in every other SFF film.
A TV series will have the chance to let the story breathe, and above all to develop the sense of Roland's absolute obsession with the Tower, and the sense of looming existential threat. It can slowly unfold the sense of a world that has "moved on"; a post-apocalyptic society grinding to a halt, where everyone has some degree of radiation poisoning (one enigmatic hint the film didn't have time to explore), where scarcity is absolute. The film shows Roland with a belt full of bullets, but part of the genius of the books was to make every bullet count, because it has been scavenged for, and because firing it now will mean not having it later, and having no way of knowing when or if there'll be more. And that's why Roland can be so staggered by simple things like Coca Cola, or aspirin; his body has never known refined sugar or modern medicine.
I think that shows like Preacher, Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones all have qualities of atmosphere, tone, worldbuilding and production values that would make for a really good adaptation of The Dark Tower. It doesn't have to be identical to the books, but it does need to import what made them compelling.
