Stephen King's The Dark Tower

I really thought people might be being too hard on this but after seeing it, and still reading the books, I was very disappointed. Liking the books but movie felt like a cash grab with "look it's Roland, Jake and Matthew McConaughey!"

And nothing to give you an idea about each. But doesn't help that it looked like King had absolutely nothing to do with it , not even an executive producer. Just a "based on..." when it ended.

I think McConaughey did fine with what he was given but he also wasn't given shit to work with for the character.

Just checking in to point and laugh. Oh, the movie where they had such blatant disregard for the source material they decided to cast a black dude as the gunslinger... it flopped? This is my surprised face.

I'm only trying to figure out -- from now on, when ass backwards casting decisions make it clear that a movie will flop horribly by signalling similar disregard for the source material... should this be known as Idrising? Elbaing? Dark Towering?

idris elba can play any character he wants, i'm fine with that. it's a little silly, sure... but to point out that him playing the gunslinger being the source of the movie's failure is kind of ridiculous.

I cant wait for the reactions when they cast a channing tatum as luke cage or something a long those lines

Phazael said:

4/10.
Too predictable, too much of the useless kid, and no real sense of scope. It also tried to cram way too much shit into one movie. Without Elba and MM, this movie would have been made for Sci-fi fodder, at best. The story was basically gutted to fit into one movie, then gutted again to try to center it around the kid who could not act worth a shit. Final CGI confrontation was not as bad as people made it sound, but it lacked any suspense and MM was criminally underused in the movie.

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The kid part really got me, the first thing he does is destroy a floor monster or whatever it was, and then never uses his powers defensively again. Like you are the most powerful shit they've ever seen and you just forget about that you can just destroy monsters? I thought that destroy with the heart shit he was going to shoot out mind bullets.


I've only read the first book, I'll probably go read the others. The movie definitely felt like it was going too fast.

Just finished seeing this finally.

As one of those who whole-heartedly expected this movie to be a failure because of black-Roland, I gotta say a black man being cast as Roland was the absolute LEAST of this movie's problems. I haven't felt this level of book-nerd rage since LOTR.

I watched this over the course of about 3 sessions. It's pretty bad, especially given the context of the books. But it's got nothing to do with Idris Elba. He's fine, the story itself is shit.

I thought I was clear but I guess not. I was not saying the black dude broke the movie. I was saying that casting a black man in a part designed for Clint Eastwood showed a complete disregard for the source material, and that would break the movie.

Out of curiousity, how far did they take it? Is all of Gilead black, or do they just have a random black gunslinger and never mention his white mom and dad?

I've never read the books. I thought Stringer Bell and Mcconaughey were decent but the movie felt rushed as fuck. It was strikingly obvious (even to someone who hasn't read the books) that this was condensed and glossed over. Even then, I found it interesting enough to finish.

Plenty of good actors have done plenty of shitty movies.

Movie was garbage, its rough trying to get through 45 minutes straight. Sucks since there was a lot of people stoked for this and now its going to be burried

Aldarion said:

I thought I was clear but I guess not. I was not saying the black dude broke the movie. I was saying that casting a black man in a part designed for Clint Eastwood showed a complete disregard for the source material, and that would break the movie.

Out of curiousity, how far did they take it? Is all of Gilead black, or do they just have a random black gunslinger and never mention his white mom and dad?

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Well clearly it wasn't going to be 126 year old Clint Eastwood. The source material isn't reliant on Roland being played by a specific actor. Nathan Drake in Uncharted won't be played by Nathan Fillion either. The movie should have been good enough that no one gave a shit about petty shit like this. But it was very bad.

If you watched the movie, you would know the answer to your question about his parents.

Aldarion said:

I thought I was clear but I guess not. I was not saying the black dude broke the movie. I was saying that casting a black man in a part designed for Clint Eastwood showed a complete disregard for the source material, and that would break the movie.

Out of curiousity, how far did they take it? Is all of Gilead black, or do they just have a random black gunslinger and never mention his white mom and dad?

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I don't think they ever mention his mom, his dad is played by President Palmer from 24 (the Allstate insurance guy) but he's in the movie for like 1 minute and it was a scene that felt like it was shot as part of reshoots and almost feels like a completely different movie shoot.

Remember, this movie went through production hell with a ton of reshoots, the head of Sony Pictures apparently getting involved so far as to edit the movie himself, test screenings that panned the film hard and led to more reshoots, multiple delays, and all kinds of other insane crap. The fact that its an actual coherent movie, albeit not very good or true to the source material, is probably considered a minor miracle by everyone involved.

chaos said:

If you watched the movie, you would know the answer to your question about his parents.

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Lets not get crazy here. Thats a rather extreme solution, dont you think?

Thanks spronk.

tbh I don't blame you for not wanting to watch it. So disappointing. I purposely burned through all the books because I wanted to get ahead of this. Now I'm stuck with both "dat ending" AND this movie.