THE WALKING DEAD’s Glen Mazzara Will Showrun The DARK TOWER TV Series

Sony Picture’s The Dark Tower is just a few days away from hitting the theatres. Here is a sample quote from IGN. Jake has awful nightmares and is compelled to draw the people and places who populate his bad dreams; his mom and his stepfather believe Jake has psychological problems, perhaps as a result of his father’s death. “You kill with your heart”.

Adapting King’s eight-book masterpiece was never going to be easy for any studio to do, but after being in development for over a decade, you would’ve thought that Columbia could at least get their first movie in the franchise right. McConaughey was last seen in “Gold” while Idris was last seen in “Star Trek Beyond”.

Elba is, as usual, a powerful force on the screen who deserves better.

The Dark Tower’s clipped pace also does the unfortunate work of making some of the details of King’s world seem pretty silly. Readers waited eagerly for about five years between each new installment of this amazingly imaginative series.

The film was initially set for release in February but was pushed back to August, which is a sign of a picture in trouble.

The movie captures neither the gravitas nor the horror of the original books in a much too short runtime riddled with confusion. Maybe that’s too aggressive a metaphor, but after watching Nikolaj Arcel’s “The Dark Tower” I left like I had just gotten off that ride. But as it turns out, you don’t actually need to know all that much going in; as Entertainment Weekly reported previous year, the movie is both a loose retelling and a sequel, depicting events that take place after the books’ cyclical ending.

Overall, I give The Dark Tower 1.5 out of 4 stars. The biggest culprit as to why The Dark Tower doesn’t work is absolutely the running time. The film succeeds as an introduction to some of the concepts and themes of the series, but ultimately getscut short and barely grazes upon numerous novels’ complex themes.

If you’re a Stephen King fan then there’s a very good chance you’ve been waiting a long, long time for The Dark Tower series to be adapted for the big screen, especially as the first reactions to the trailer were so positive. There’s an unseen otherworld right next to ours, accessible by a hidden portal, and there’s an ultimate battle between the forces of darkness and light.

At one point, I was imaging what it must have been like to edit this movie. But the plain, ironic truth is that the movie itself feels derivative, even generic.

“It’s clear there’s supposed to be something rich and complicated here”.

In the final book of the Dark Tower series, King introduces parallel timelines.

Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers calls the film a “major misfire” and begins his one-star review writing: “So much is so wrong about The Dark Tower”. “The story is I’m trying to bring down this tower that holds the universe together”. It is deep, complex and has subtle undertones.

Many more reviews will come in before the final Rotten Tomatoes score for The Dark Tower is determined, but a start this poor is nearly always the kiss of death in terms of critical consensus. Described as more of an origin story compared to the movie, the plot will be based on Wizard in Glass, the fourth book in The Dark Tower series, focusing on a younger Roland.