The Dark Tower: A Tale

analysis
#1

I should have read some reviews before going to see this one. Having seen it now, I’d say this movie is a great example of a tale that doesn’t give us any reason to care about what “they” are doing. As far as I can tell it’s all Overall Story.

Jake Chambers, the kid, is the audience’s window into the story, but he has no personal issues to give him a proper MC throughline. At least, anything that might have been personal to him was rolled into the OS.

I saw neither an IC throughline nor an attempt at one. Roland Deschain (the Gunslinger) was probably supposed to fill this role. He wanted revenge against the Man in Black. This was addressed in the film, but didn’t particularly feel addressed. I kept waiting for the scene that showed what happened only to realize later that there was a scene that was probably meant to show it, but it felt only tangentially related.

The Gunslinger and the kid do some stuff together, so there may have been an attempt to hint at an RS. The RS isn’t my strong suit so I might be missing something, but as little as there was to the MC and IC, I really don’t think there was an RS either.

Roland and the Man in Black are the protagonist and antagonist, although i’m not sure if the goal was to destroy the tower (meaning the Man in Black is the protagonist) or if the goal was to save the tower (meaning the Gunslinger is the protagonist). However, I’d guess that it was the former since Jake and Roland speak about how Roland is more interested in revenge than saving the tower. But if that’s right, that means it was a (spoiler alert … ) story outcome of Failure. But that seems strange, because is seems like if the audience cared what happened (and I certainly didn’t) the film would have wanted the Outcome to feel like a Success.

I could spot various situations, activities, fixed attitudes, and manipulations throughout, but most of them seemed to me like storytelling rather than sources of conflict.

There was plenty wrong (in my opinion) with the writing and acting (Elba was good, the best thing the movie had to offer i thought), but if the film had given Jake a personal issue to resolve, and if the Gunslinger had been given a chance to have any type of impact on him, it would have been a much better story. Even better would be if they had made the Gunslinger the MC and the MIB the IC. Either of those changes would have made the movie watchable, even if still not great.

All that said, I’ll just say that it seems pretty clear that, despite what happened in the world of the movie, in our world The Dark Tower has already fallen.

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#2

Awesome review! This would explain the 18% on RT—a shame since I like both actors.

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#3

Did you know Stephen King is a Pantser? He has vehemently stated how he hates outlines and never uses them. It’s sad his Muse didn’t offer him a gem this time. But for me, this is why I’m biased toward Outlines. They are always closer to GAS 's.

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#4

His statements on the matter, actually, are why I spent so long not worrying about outlines myself. It has obviously worked for him, but I would agree that some familiarity with Dramatica could have made his stuff even better.

And I wouldn’t fault Mr. King for the failure of this movie…at least not entirely. The first four books or so were really good. I understand that the idea behind the movie was that it was supposed to be a sequel to the books rather than an adaptation. I was excited about that idea, but thought the movie would have been better had it followed the first book more closely (if you’ve read the books, the idea of both a sequel and an adaptation of the first book should make sense).

For me, the movie had two big problems that really doomed it. The first is, as I said above, that it was all OS. As much as I didn’t care for the story that was presented, I think I could have if only there had been some personal issue for the MC for me to latch onto.

The second is that I guess they weren’t confident they would get to stretch this thing out into a franchise and so decided to make the introductory movie also be a standalone with an ending that wouldn’t leave you wondering what happened to the tower if they didn’t get to make another one. In order to do that, they drew from all seven books when they should’ve just drawn from the first three or so. Trying not to spoil it too much, but what they did would have been roughly equivalent to The Lord of the Rings movies showing Frodo destroying the ring at the end of the first movie only to find it not really destroyed in the second movie or something.

Last thing I’ll say is that I’m not sure how many of Kings works are or attempt to be GAS’s (I bought a new copy of Different Seasons several months ago so I could read Rita Hayworth and the Shawahank Redemption again to see if it’s as much of a GAS as the movie but haven’t got around to it yet) , and it’s been a long time since I’ve read The Gunslinger, but I think the book probably came a little closer than the movie did, although my guess is the book still falls short as well.

#5

Okay, so one more last thing about the film, though it’s less related to Dramatica. The film had waaayyyy too much Stargate-type sci-fi when it should have felt more magical and mystical. It should have felt less like a bad episode of the 90s series of The Outer Limits and more like a good episode of The Twilight Zone, if that makes any sense.

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