Idris Elba as Roland Deschain?!

[DukeDeMondo]

I dunno how involved he was, but he was crowing on for ages about how great it turned out on Facebook in the run up to release. Not so much afterwards.

[BritishHobo]

I get that often you may be blinded by the sheer joy of seeing your own characters and world. finally make it to screen, but I can't really see how that would happen here. Idris and Matthew do look good in the parts, but the world itself is shockingly poor. It's nothing. It is like starting Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and the hobbits just live in a boring empty field and they get to Mordor and it's just a little cave.

[colacentral]

I bet he'd still say it's better than The Shining, the clueless berk.

[Head Gardener]

I though it was OK, I enjoyed it more than Baby Driver to be honest, but at times it reminded me of the old kids TV series The Tripods

[Glebe]

I saw this Friday night, only getting round to attempting my little review now... it actually starts off well enough, different from the books of course, but reasonably watchable, despite some clunky dialogue. But it just ends up being too bland to capture the weird flavor of the books, and at 90 minutes there's little chance of developing the story and characters properly. Also, some of it is a bit too science fiction, with the doors and that. And McConaughey is just not mysterious enough to truly intrigue as Walter. A definite missed opportunity... just wondering if the planned TV series is really going to go ahead now.

[Bad Ambassador]

I saw a comment that the Man in Black was effectively GOB Bluth, so now I want to see it.

[Dex Sawash]

I saw a comment that the Man in Black was effectively GOB Bluth, so now I want to see it.

[SavageHedgehog]

Awful. The first act was reasonably entertaining, I liked the shades of Invaders From Mars/Body Snatchers. But overall it's a horrible mess, almost totally unengaging with no breathing space for any of its ideas, characters or even for a moment to land. I still don't really get the appeal of Elba, but he's hardly at fault here. McConaughey has a couple of nice scenery chewing moments, but nothing I'll still remember in a year, if that.

Two moments which showcase how little imagination and wit there is here (spoilers, I guess, but not really):
. McConaughey enters our world. He sees a young girl and her mother on a park bench eating ice cream. He flicks his hand in the young girl's direction and says "evil!" The girl's eyes turn to an evil glow. This did make me grin. What will she do? Well, apparently nothing because it cuts away straight afterwards!
. Towards the end of the film McConaughey physically forces a gun shop owner to shoot at Elba via telepathic powers. We know that he's being forced against his will because the shop owner literally tells us "it's not me doing this!". God forbid we assume this for ourselves, or that this be conveyed through the use of cinematic language.

The NRA, however, should love it. They're welcome to it

P.S. Yes, I was wrong

[wooders1978]

I don't really get the thought process behind tying this film into the dark tower - it's so different from the books it probably could have stood up as a movie in its own right with a namechange here and there - could have even said it was inspired by the dark tower universe if you really had to have Elba as a gunslinger
All this will do is dissapont book fanboys like me and everyone else will be indifferent to it
Schlocky shite

[Glebe]

Stephen King on His New Netflix Movies, It, and His Big Year.

You're now on the other side of The Dark Tower, a movie that was so long in the making but didn't completely work. What was the challenge there?

The major challenge was to do a film based on a series of books that's really long, about 3,000 pages. The other part of it was the decision to do a PG-13 feature adaptation of books that are extremely violent and deal with violent behavior in a fairly graphic way. That was something that had to be overcome, although I've gotta say, I thought [screenwriter] Akiva Goldsman did a terrific job in taking a central part of the book and turning it into what I thought was a pretty good movie. The TV series they're developing now ... we'll see what happens with that. It would be like a complete reboot, so we'll just have to see.

"...a complete reboot..." Crikey.

[Bazooka]

Stephen King on His New Netflix Movies, It, and His Big Year.

"...a complete reboot..." Crikey.

You really need an HBO Game of Thrones budget to pull it off.

[wooders1978]

I hope they do - a mix between westworld and got with some horror thrown in - money maker

[Shaky]

I sort of got lost during all the development hell stuff over the years but have they ever said why they felt it had to be a movie first up? I could understand them producing a TV series first to test the waters, crucially allowing the world and characters time to build and thus giving any future movie(s) much more leeway instead of trying to cram too much in. Plus King's name on a flick was far from guaranteed gold in recent years until IT came along. Just seems a very arse about tit way of doing things.

[BritishHobo]

Well the show was meant to be something to keep the franchise afloat in between films. A way of covering stuff like the backstory in Wizard of Glass so that not only does it NOT get in the way of the main story, it also helps keep people interested while the next film gets made. Focusing almost entirely on backstory would also have meant some other production unit could crack on making it without worrying about the main cast of the films.

Now, though... who knows what form it'll take?

[Glebe]

Deleted scenes (approx. 6 mins long, repeats after that).

A glimpse of one the 'ordinary' portal doors from the book there, wish they'd have left that in.

[Steve Lampkins]

I finally got round to watching this moments ago. And what a disappointment. Seeing as I have read the books, I am trying to judge it based on if I would not have known how rich that world is. But it's a struggle. I thought the actors were fine; it was just this weird fan-fic story/plot that let it down so badly.