In your attempts to be super literal, you are clearly avoiding the point. They decided to play scattershot with the narrative, picking and choosing stuff from the first 3 books to play with. This is why it is a narrative mess in theory. It jumps around, without telling an actual story. And that is before we get into them seemingly changing the motives of the Man in Black.
Darth, sometimes words and their meaning, and contexts, matter.
it's a disingenous, hyperbolic statement to make.
If the argument is "They tried to shove all the elements from all the books into one film", then that argument is factually inaccurate. They have clearly not attempted to do that, and they flat out TOLD us what their approach was going to be before this ever got off the ground. They were going to draw from several of the books...not all of them.
Is your argument that it is a narrative mess because it isn't faithful?
Because general audiences likely don't know how faithful it is. People who have never read the books don't know that. And I seriously doubt their test audience was made up of all Dark Tower diehards, or we wouldn't have ended up with the "Slam Evil" marketing campaign. So if it was a narrative mess in test screenings, the reason it was a narrative mess doesn't neccessarily have to do with the fidelity to the source material.
If they played scattershot with the narrative, at least based on the trailer, they nontheless seem to have picked some of the broadest stuff possible. The types of concepts that should fit into pretty much any "adventure" or "fantasy" narrative. Why wouldn't they? A world ending threat? Henchmen? That's as generic as it gets, and not especially difficult to fit conceptually into a number of types of narratives.
And the Gunslinger is incredibly easy to adapt in well under 2 hours, without skimping on the action. We live in a world where Westworld has just started and is already becoming a big deal. And that meanderings like crazy.
I don't know about "incredibly easy".
Yes, Westworld meanders a bit. Which you can do in an episodic, television format, because the story elements are meant to be viewed within the larger season narrative when assessing the structure of the story.
That doesn't really fly in a film. When a film meanders, it gets called unfocused, incoherent, etc...people ***** about pacing, and so on.
And lets not even get into the meandering LotR that worked so damn well.
The Gunslinger does not need to meander at all
Eh, LOTR meanders a whole lot less than the books. They very much streamlined it when they adapted it.
Unless you're going to adapt it faithfully, in which case, compared to most stories, it very much does kind of need to meander. A bunch of fairly random stuff just kind of happens in The Gunslinger, and in subsequent books. Deus Ex Machina stuff, random stuff that Roland just knows about that wasn't really set up...kids showing up out of nowhere, does that random stuff have a meaning within the plot? Yes. It's still random. Tonally jarring in places. From a narrative standpoint it is, dare I say it, kind of a mess.
and this is just an excuse of why they have decided on their disastrous approach. Just like the defense of The Fantastic Four, which did the same thing in abandoning the source material, leading to a disaster.
I have never excused anything here.
I am simply talking about the possible reasons this film shaped up as it did, and the process of its adaption.
