Stephen King's Epic "The Dark Tower" - Part 1

[DarthSkywalker]

Well, this is going to suck.

 

[The Infernal]

I still don't think IT looks all that great, but not as bad as The Dark Tower at the moment.

 

[harlequinade]

Looks awful, the lines near the end were just hilarious

 

[OtherwiseKnownAs]

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

God-****ing-dammit Sony.

 

[Joe Von Zombie]

I still don't think IT looks all that great, but not as bad as The Dark Tower at the moment.

It at least looks like an actual adaptation of that material.

 

[Man in the Suit]

Wow, this really looks like a Sony movie. Dammit

 

[scarlet-witch]

McConaughey doesn't convince me as a villain in that trailer. (I know it's short, but still)

 

[kguillou]

As someone who knows nothing about the source material, i liked the first half of the trailer and then rolled my eyes through the rest. The line deliveries, yet another movie with a portal in the sky, it just looked like a movie trying hard to be a generic blockbuster. Sigh...maybe I'm just growing numb to this type of movie?

 

[wnjcwjkk]

Credit where it's due, Elba seems good as Roland, and I didn't like his casting for the role personally.

But the rest, eh, doorways are now portals, the house coming alive to stop Jake going through the door seems to be gone, not to mention no Susannah in the scene means no Mordred being conceived. On top of that we actually see the tower in the first movie? And Walter has Chronicle powers now? Ugh, this just does not look good.

Just saw the trailer.


I read these books as a teen. For me, as obsessed as I was with Westerns at the time, Dark Tower was probably the equivalent of LoTR for a lot of kids that age.


I was frankly a little let down and felt like there was a lot of stuff I wish he had done differently in those final three books. Anybody who's read them and felt something didn't sit quite right and then went and read hundreds of reviews probably knows the main criticisms.


But, I've been intrigued by the prospect of a film series ever since it was first rumored. I love Elba as Stringer Bell but I'll be honest and say I was a little taken aback by his casting, I actually thought the other way around with McConoughay as Roland and Elba as the villainous Man In Black would've worked better.

But now that I've seen the trailer, I'm totally in for it and love the casting and am really looking forward to.


It looks like they are going to be changing and rearranging and condensing a lot of the story, which I think is going to be very beneficial for a film series. For the longest, I've felt like it should've been an HBO series to get the most out of the story, but now I'm coming around to the idea of trimming some of the fat, hopefully removing some of the more Stephen King-y weirdness (sometimes he puts too much of his own voice into the stories, his own weird quirks, similar to the way Tarantino writes), and also having a bigger effects budget, is going to really benefit the film series.


Hopefully, for example, they take the opportunity to do The Crimson King the Justice he deserves, his part in the actual book series fell completely flat for me.


Overall, probably my second most anticipated film, after Justice League

 

[Fincher]

It's not what I would look for in a Dark Tower movie, but I'm not that put off by it as a movie in its own right.

 

[The Endless]

This should've been a high quality tv/Netflix/Amazon series really. There is just too much to cram into even a trilogy.

 

[Joe Von Zombie]

Hopefully this film will finally be the nail in the coffin for Sony pictures, they'll sell off the rights to the franchises they still have and get out of the movie business. They clearly have no ****ing clue.

 

[Lily Adler]

I can see this being taken by Netflix and turned into a television series.

 

[rogue trooper]

I really liked the epic vibe of the trailer. Elba and McConaughey look superb. Loved the music from For A Few Dollars More. Very fitting. Really digging the scope of it all so far.

 

[Black Narcissus]

My favorite book series ever....turned to isssh.

 

[DarthSkywalker]

My favorite book series ever....turned to isssh.

I feel you BN. It is one of my favorites as well, even if the last 3 books are a bit... different.

This has so much potential, especially as a TV series. But you could easily pull off a movie series as well. And they are wasting it, completely. It not only looks nothing like the series, it doesn't even look good.

 

[chamber-music]

Sony gonna Sony

 

[The Apocalypse]

Sony gonna Sony

It kind of gets on my nerves that King is approving of this too.

 

[Joe Von Zombie]

It kind of gets on my nerves that King is approving of this too.

Their check cleared.

 

[FunkMiller]

My favorite book series ever....turned to isssh.

Right there with ya.

...well, at least up as far as the end of book 5. The last three dip in quality severely, thanks to King's accident, and the subsequent effect it had on the Tower cycle. All that 19 garbage gets tired really quickly, and the meta stuff is grating after a while as well.

I looked forward to this movie because I figured it had to jettison a lot of that navel gazing, but then this trailer comes along and my hopes of a decent turn of the wheel have been dashed.

 

[Black Narcissus]

It just hurts to see the potential of this material wasted. I imagine a long form on HBO or netflix, goddamn.

 

[FunkMiller]

It just hurts to see the potential of this material wasted. I imagine a long form on HBO or netflix, goddamn.

Hell, even Starz, given what they're doing with American Gods... we'd certainly get an adaptation more aimed at a mature audience.

This thing seems to be aimed at the same people who enjoy the Resident Evil and Underworld movies.

Why have a tense palaver over a fire that acts as both character study and story exposition, when you can have a big sci-fi shoot-out with lots of slo-mo?!

 

[Rowsdower!]

Yeah, Starz has put out some high quality material. Black Sails is epic as f***.

I don't think this looks as awful as whatever Paul W.S. Anderson's last movie was, but it definitely looks bad. There's so much potential here and they blew it. Yeah, I know we've only seen a two-minute trailer, but come on. It's obvious. This is the first footage we've seen, and the movie comes out in three months. It's a mess, and they KNOW it.

Sony needs to go under. The only movie they have coming out that has a shot in hell of being good is Spider-Man, and that's only because Marvel had a huge hand in putting it together.

 

[DarthSkywalker]

It just hurts to see the potential of this material wasted. I imagine a long form on HBO or netflix, goddamn.

That Westworld exist shows exactly how awesome it could be.

 

[Rowsdower!]

Yeah, I think that if I want to see a Dark Tower movie, I'll just put on an episode of Westworld, turn the volume down, play a Dark Tower audiobook and pretend that Ed Harris is Roland, Tessa Thompson is Susannah, Even Rachel Wood is Susan Delgado and that twitchy English guy is Eddie.