The Dark Tower Movie
The reactions of some fans shows why Stephen King wrote Misery years earlier
"Why would Sai King let this happen to his greatest, most complete work?”
—a pissed-off fan learning about how the movie wasn’t a Lord of the Rings kind of cinematic reproduction of the books.
And it’s still pissing off people almost 8 years later.
Also, note that the most insanely inflexible fans are those, like this guy above, who refer to Stephen King as “Sai King” and lard their everyday language with phrases used by characters in the book. I have a more complete treatment of those folks in another, earlier, piece in which I use characters in Stand by Me and their reaction the Lard Ass story contained in the story to illustrate the different types of readers of Stephen King.
I told that reader the following three points are why he had problems with that movie, only some lying in him.
1) Unreasonable expectations. For you, the whole thing seemed bad because of your expectations. That's the problem with unreasonable expectations: you will always be disappointed by reality.
I went into the movie knowing that it would bear little resemblance to any of the story lines in the book. I recognized all the different elements that came from the books but never allowed myself to think, "Hey, but this was supposed to be like that or this was to follow that."
The movie DID have character development. It had an understandable story line and intelligible trajectory.
Those I took to see it had never read any of the dark tower books. They all loved the story and had no problem whatsoever following it.
The Dark Tower movie turned out to be what in music would be called a fantasy on a theme by another composer. Many elements of the original composition appear but they are incorporated into a new work with its own logic and development.
It's also similar to a dream that incorporates elements from waking life into the dream fantasy that usually always has its own strange logic.
The benefit of the movie, unlike a dream, is that it was done with the cooperation of the author. The movie makers and SK knew that a single movie couldn't contain the multi-volume world of the Dark Tower.
They all knew that the first book wouldn't work as a movie, though the Drawing of the Three would have been great.
I think the whole effort in making a movie got so bogged down that the only way out was something that would contain the essential themes of the whole series wrapped up in a new storyline, where Jake would incorporate talents of several other characters, and the story would still have the essentials: the Gunslinger, the Man in Black, the Dark Tower, an organization dedicated to destroying it, and the Gunslinger and Jake trying to foil them.
You were simply your own worst enemy when walking in to see this motion picture.
2) The series was too big. It had too many characters, with much of the action taking place over too short a period of time (from the time Eddie was brought over to the time Susan rolled out) to be able to film all that in a short enough time that everyone wouldn't obviously age horribly.
This Dark Tower-themed movie took so long to make that even though movie time in Jake's world was only a week or so the actor Jake went through at least 1.5 Tanner stages of pubertal development.
3) The series had exactly the same problems as life. You were too familiar with the series and you had adopted it as more than a merely a series of stories. Having read all the books many times over a period of years, you were familiar with the whole life span of the work and its mythic scope. But only the second and third books are solid gold in almost every way. This is because they are full of purposeful action in a vast sea of possibilities. At that point "the dark tower" still has the power of myth.
It's a driving force, though no one actually knows how, and a powerful goal, though no one actually knows why, except for being the "everything depends on it, it's under attack, the world is beginning to turn to shit as a result, and if we don't save it then all is lost," basically the literary equivalent of anthropogenic global warming.
The arc of action of the whole series is sort of like that of life itself:
The first book, like pregnancy, infancy, and early childhood, is interesting for matters of incipient promise that is most fully understood in the context of later development.
The second and third books, like late teens and early adulthood, are full of promise and action and striving toward goals that still seem meaningful, worthwhile, and doable, but that still exude a sense of mystery and breadth of potential.
After that, terminal differentiation has begun to set in, each step forward reduces possibilities as it increases certainty, that certainty a poisoner of mystery, the sense of onward movement increasingly being elicited not by the beckoning of mystery but by the exigency of mere habit.
Along the way into advancing dotage there is the looking back over earlier portions of one's life (the time with Susan Delgado), seeking to find something, anything that can inform the present and, if not able actually to change anything, perhaps make what increasingly appears to be inevitable at least somewhat intelligible but, in the end, failing.
Along the way on that glide path toward senescence and death there may be, along with the inexplicable and meaningless loss of family and friends from one's ongoing story, occasional weird or unusual occurrences (Riddling with Blaine, Andy the Robot and the Wolves, Mia's pregnancy, meeting the God of one's universe who appears to be less than his own creation, the joke-telling energy vampire, etc) that, like some kind of unusual external buffeting, threaten (or promise) to pitch you off into unknown territory where something unexpected and wonderful could still occur but which settle down and leave you centered ever deeper in your habitual groove, gliding toward an inevitable and ultimately meaningless end:
1. your evil son bent on your destruction for no good reason wiped out by, but killing Oi, your version of man's best friend,
2. your sweet son you first put to death, but then saved from death, yet still dying to save the God of your universe from some dumber-than-fuck Maine DUI hick trying to keep the dog out of the groceries,
3. your ultimate enemy turning out to be a trapped but dangerous nutcase who literally gets wiped out by a talented but tongueless boy who can draw things into existence and erase things from existence but who cannot fundamentally change that existence
4. the object of your quest, the Dark Tower, which is supposed to be the center of all existence, being instead a repository of every moment you ever lived and everything you ever were, the ascension of which leads you, in the bear went over the mountain mode, into what appears to be a scarcely changed, unconscious, iterative loop.
On one end of life, that Object of Desire, as powerful as it was unclearly or incompletely defined, imbued everything with color and meaning and purpose.
At the other end, the less meaningful the closer to it one gets, that Object of Desire not only fails to illuminate the future and the present but, when one turns to look back over one's path, the once-certain and clearly illuminated past is as jumbled and dark as the present and as meaningless as what appears to be left of the future.
My reaction exactly, Mr. King cheated. I expected missing letters and digits.