DARK TOWER - August 4th - Bomb Incoming!

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Monterey Jack
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Re: DARK TOWER - WB Passes, MRC in Talks to Buy Property

#16 Post by Monterey Jack »



Well, it looks like a movie...but that ain't The Dark Tower in any way, shape or form. :? Maybe, like World War Z, it'll turn out to be a decent movie in its own right, but why buy the rights to the damn books if you're not even gonna TRY to emulate them?

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Re: DARK TOWER - WB Passes, MRC in Talks to Buy Property

#17 Post by AndyDursin »

So weird. Seems to me like they decided they couldn't make the books -- or didn't want to -- so a more commercial "inspired by" type of project is what they settled on.

Also, still think it's bizarre this movie is opening in 3 months and this is the first trailer they've issued. Lack of promotion is staggering, and makes you wonder if Sony hasn't given up after seeing it. Guess we'll find out in August!

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Re: DARK TOWER - August 4th - Trailer

#18 Post by mkaroly »

Boy, if the plan was to do all the books in film and on TV, this looks nothing like the book at all. This could be the epically worst adaptation of a Stephen King novel ever...lol...not excited about this one. And frankly, I think the scope of The Dark Tower series is too big and complex for adaptation as a whole. Just my opinion.

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Re: DARK TOWER - WB Passes, MRC in Talks to Buy Property

#19 Post by Monterey Jack »

AndyDursin wrote: Also, still think it's bizarre this movie is opening in 3 months and this is the first trailer they've issued. Lack of promotion is staggering, and makes you wonder if Sony hasn't given up after seeing it.
Shades of Dark Shadows, where the first trailer didn't drop until barely TWO months before the release date (and then WB screwed the pooch further by opening it in the middle of May, right after The Avengers). Hey, I actually liked Dark Shadows, but it was like WB saw it as a tax write-off and little else. Same thing with The Dark Tower...say what you will about Ron Howard, but he can make a classically-polished studio movie, and would have attracted a lot more name talent than this. Idris Elba is a terrific actor, but even putting aside the race thing, he's a terrible choice for Roland, a white dude described as "Long, tall and ugly" in the books, none of which applies to Elba. They couldn't even bother to give him a damn HAT? :? And McConaughey is likewise a fine actor, but it seems like they've beefed by the Man In Black's role just to give an Oscar-winner a larger role.

Who knows, this might turn out to be okay, but as a long-time fan of the Dark Tower series, this could not look less like the source material, and for what is obviously supposed to be a franchise-starter, the fact that it's being dumped in August with so little promotional material is telling. This is the kind of material that cried out for a long-form presentation on TV...I'm sure HBO could have done justice to it after they're done with Game Of Thrones.

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Re: DARK TOWER - August 4th - Trailer

#20 Post by AndyDursin »

This is the same Ron Howard though who just laid two bombs in a row with IN THE HEART OF THE SEA and INFERNO. And Akiva Goldsman has ruined many a film with terrible scripts. Plus do we need to talk about Sony's track record lately with would-be franchises?

Fans seem to be irate over this too. I wonder if any of those side projects like the TV series are ever going to happen...I'm going to wager no!

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Re: DARK TOWER - August 4th - Trailer

#21 Post by Monterey Jack »

NINETY-FIVE-MINUTE running time. :shock:

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AndyDursin
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Re: DARK TOWER - August 4th - Trailer

#22 Post by AndyDursin »

Sorry MJ, I know you like the brevity, but that is NOT a good sign! Lol

Sounds like Dunkirk works fine for the kind of "experience" it is but 95 minutes likely means Sony is cutting its losses with this one.

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Re: DARK TOWER - August 4th - Trailer

#23 Post by Monterey Jack »

Girls Trip is a half-hour longer than an adaptation of a book series that sprawled across seven novels and approximately 3,000+ pages of text. :? I'm usually all for movies with compact running times, but this is ABSURD. Imagine The Godfather condensed into a 90-minute B-movie.

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Re: DARK TOWER - August 4th - Trailer

#24 Post by AndyDursin »

The run time, the lack of promotion, the August release date (after being bounced around the schedule), the decision to scale back the intended franchise spin-offs/TV series/etc = looks like it's over.

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Re: DARK TOWER - August 4th - Trailer

#25 Post by AndyDursin »

Called it!

On the flip side, it's really amazing -- and also depressing -- how the initial project announced 7 years ago (check the first post in this thread!) led to THIS. :shock:
The 95-minute culmination of years-long efforts to bring “The Dark Tower” to the big screen is a complete disaster, a limp, barely coherent shell of a movie.
http://www.thewrap.com/dark-tower-revie ... -misfires/
The Dark Tower is so astoundingly awful that when you leave the theater you’ll likely be less mad you wasted your time than flabbergasted that something like this could a) happen and b) be released as something that, theoretically, is going to launch a multi-platform franchise.

In trying to think of another movie The Dark Tower reminded me of, the closest I could come up with is Jonah Hex.
http://uproxx.com/movies/the-dark-tower-review/

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Re: DARK TOWER - August 4th - Bomb Incoming!

#26 Post by Monterey Jack »

The new Last Airbender...an adaptation so staggeringly inept and wrongheaded it will kill any future attempt to adapt the source material properly for decades. :cry:

Still...I'm morbidly interested to see just how badly they've loused it up. And at least King fans have the very promising-looking It coming up in a month to salve our wounds. 8)

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Re: DARK TOWER - August 4th - Bomb Incoming!

#27 Post by Monterey Jack »

1/10

What the dad-a-chok was that?! This honestly ranks down there with Maximum Overdrive and Dreamcatcher in the bottom-of-the-barrel worst of Stephen King adaptations, and -- scratch that, those movies were at least entertaining in their howlingly schlocky awfulness. It's confounding how little of this even vaguely resembles the books...it's like the writers just skimmed the back of the paperbacks, and devised a screenplay based on that. Idris Elba is stoic to the point of catatonia, Matthew McConaughey coasts by on oily smarm, the kid playing Jake Chambers delivers one of the worst child actor performances since Jake Lloyd in The Phantom Menace (there's a bit where he's supposed to be expressing disbelieving grief, and I found myself chortling uncontrollably at his contorted facial "ACT-ing!"), the visual effects are low-rent and don't show you anything you haven't seen in dozens upon dozens of other fantasy movies over the last 40 years (we're supposed to be wowed by Jake's first transportation to Roland's "world", and all we see is the same binary moon we've been seeing since Star Wars, hovering over a generic, rocky plain), and the whole thing plays like an entire, convoluted season of Lost reduced to an 88-minute sizzle reel. And the incessant King Easter Eggs studded throughout (hey, look, that woman's taking Cujo for a walk! Hey, look, Jake's friend is pushing a scale-model Christine around on the carpet! Hey, look, the portal code is 1408!) come across as galling fanservice from an author who is clearly cashing a big, stinky check by heartily endorsing this catastrophic failure as a worthy adaptation of his greatest fantasy epic. It's not even watchable on its own terms, divorced from the source material...I can't imagine how incoherent this will seem to anyone who has never picked up one of the books before. Drab, bland, and unintentionally amusing, this might rank with M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender as one of the all-time worst desecrations of superb source material I have ever seen. I don't use the adjective "Infuriated" very often to describe my reaction to a film, but this definitely applies. This has truly forgotten the face of its father. :x

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Re: DARK TOWER - August 4th - Bomb Incoming!

#28 Post by Monterey Jack »

Well, looks like another take is in the works, and as a television series from the gifted Mike Flanagan. :)

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/the-da ... 235454046/

Hopefully they can cast someone who resembles the character on the page this time. :?

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