The Dark Tower runs 95 minutes. That is the single most honest thing about it. Nikolaj Arcel’s adaptation of Stephen King’s eight-novel series was meant to launch a multimedia franchise. What arrived in 2017 is a film that sprints through a mythology it never earns, and the published critical score of 3.4/10 is not harsh. It is accurate.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Idris Elba as Roland Deschain
Elba is the one element that works. He plays Roland Deschain, the last of the Gunslingers, a man pursuing Walter Padick for the deaths of his father Stephen and the other Gunslingers. Arcel said of the casting: “For me, it just clicked. He’s such a formidable man.” King agreed, calling Elba “a terrific actor, one of the best working in the business now.”
The praise is not misplaced. Elba carries the film’s few moments of weight. But a good Roland cannot fix a story that gives him almost nothing to do.
A Boy With Pure Shine
Tom Taylor plays Jake Chambers, an eleven-year-old haunted by visions of the Man in Black and a Tower that supports all realities. His mother, stepfather and psychiatrists dismiss the visions as trauma from his father’s death. Then a team claiming to be from a private psychiatric facility arrives to collect him. Jake recognizes them from his visions as monsters wearing human skin.
He flees through a portal into Mid-World, a post-apocalyptic landscape, and finds Roland. Together they learn that Walter has spent decades abducting children with psychic powers, using their “shine” to bring down the Dark Tower. Sayre tells Walter that Jake has “pure Shine” — enough to destroy the Tower single-handedly.
Matthew McConaughey as Walter Padick
McConaughey plays the timeless sorcerer who wants to unleash eternal darkness. Arcel said: “Matthew is an incredible actor who can do anything. That’s how I feel about [Walter]. He could do anything.”
That is the problem. Walter can do anything, so nothing he does costs him. He murders Jake’s stepfather and tortures his mother for information, and the film treats both as plot beats rather than horrors. McConaughey drifts through scenes with a smirk, and the script never gives him a reason to be frightening.
Ten Years of Starts and Stops
The production history explains the result. Development began in 2007 and passed through three major phases:
- J. J. Abrams, from 2007 to 2009
- Ron Howard, from 2010 to 2015
- Nikolaj Arcel, the final iteration
The rights moved between Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures and Lionsgate Entertainment. The film combines elements from all eight novels, mostly the first and third, and is a canonical sequel to the books.
That is not a movie. That is a committee’s compromise, and it shows in every scene that gestures at a larger world it has no time to build.
New York and Mid-World
The film splits its time between modern-day New York City and Mid-World, Roland’s Old West-style parallel universe. The Dark Tower is a neo-Western science fantasy, and the genre mixing is the most interesting thing it attempts. It just never commits. Mid-World gets a village and a seer. New York gets a lab. Neither feels like a place anyone lives.
The seer tells Roland the machine is six months away on foot. The only shortcut runs through one of Walter’s secret labs. That is the entire geography of a universe-spanning story.
What Actually Matters Here
Ranking the failures:
- The runtime. Ninety-five minutes cannot hold eight novels.
- The villain. Walter has no cost and no fear.
- The world. Mid-World and New York are sets, not settings.
Elba’s Roland is the exception, and it is the reason this film is remembered at all. Critics praised his performance consistently, and they were right to. He found a character inside a script that did not contain one.
The Dark Tower is not a disaster because it is unfaithful to King. It is a disaster because it is faithful to nothing — not the books, not its own mythology, not even its own running time. It is a trailer stretched to feature length, and the franchise it was meant to launch never arrived.
3.4 of 10.
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