A Towering Inferno: First Critical Reviews Slam 'The Dark Tower' Movie Adaptation

As we prepare to climb The Dark Tower and bring Stephen King's fantasy opus to our screens, it looks like we are heading to the Wild West for a shootout with those critical reviews. Given that other King adaptations like The Shining and Misery are lauded as some of the best horrors to grace cinema, can a move away from what the author does best still do a Shawshank Redemption and go down well with movie fans?

Adapting King's eight-book masterpiece was never going to be easy for any studio to do, but after being in development for over a decade, you would've thought that Columbia could at least get their first movie in the franchise right. However, Danish director Nikolaj Arcel famously clashed with the studio, and alongside budget concerns and numerous delays, it has led us to today and the film that we are ultimately left with.

With an all-star cast of #IdrisElba and #MatthewMcConaughey, plus legendary screenwriter Akiva Goldsman behind the scenes, many hoped that #TheDarkTower would be too big to fall. So, has Sony's franchise taken a bullet from a Gunslinger before it even had the chance to reload? Let's see what the critics had to say.

Darkness Falls

Well, the reviews are in, and I can only politely say that it all sounds a bit sh*t. From a lack of using source material to poor character development, missing key scenes or just plain bad acting, it looks like The Dark Tower is about to be run out of town by the movie critic banditos.

While IGN praises the performances from both Elba and McConaughey, it seems that they alone can't make up for a lackluster script of this paper-thin adaptation:

“The deeply flawed and compellingly tragic characters that King created are one-dimensional in their on-screen adaptations because the motivations that give them that depth are completely lost to the wind. That’s not to say the performances are bad – in fact, I absolutely adore the casting of the leads. […] But there’s no meat on the bone of the script for arguably two of the finest actors of our time to really dig in and give us something we haven’t seen before.”

Elsewhere, Birth Movies Death claims that the sweeping epic of King's pages are lost within the movie's rather stingy 95-minute runtime:

“The Dark Tower is a deeply flawed movie. It’s a film that feels rushed and plodding, sometimes within the same scene. It’s a film that saddles two of our greatest working actors with clunky dialogue and muddled motivations. It’s a film that feels claustrophobic and oddly contained when it should’ve felt sweeping and epic. After decades of waiting, after months of keeping our fingers crossed and hoping for the best, it brings me zero pleasure to report that The Dark Tower doesn’t really work.”

The Guardian sees The Dark Tower as a thoroughly forgettable affair that fails to live up to its own book series or the Lord of the Rings entities that King loosely based his saga on:

"It’s rare a film so convoluted manages to be so determinedly boring. Lucky for you, it vanishes from the mind as soon as it ends. There’s a point somewhere in the misshapen second act that an attentive viewer can feel all the parties involved giving up and resolving to get the rest of the movie over with as soon as possible."

Most worryingly — and similar to Universal's Dark Universe — The Hollywood Reporter's John DeForce has doubts that The Dark Tower can launch the shared universe of movies that Sony is hoping for:

“Though far from the muddled train wreck we’ve been led to expect, this Tower lacks the world-constructing gravitas of either the Tolkien books that inspired King or the franchise-launching movies that Sony execs surely have in mind. Though satisfying enough to please many casual moviegoers drawn in by King’s name and stars Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, it will likely disappoint many serious fans and leave other newbies underwhelmed.”

However, it was Uproxx's Mike Ryan who really dug the knife in for The Dark Tower, and failing to find anything redeeming at all, wins the award for the most brutally honest review:

"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."

It was no wonder that there was an embargo on critical reviews ahead of the movie's release, and many of us had expected some negativity toward the first ever adaptation of King's acclaimed book series. That being said, it seems that The Dark Tower has really raised the bar on this one.

As a follow-up to King's series of novels, it seems that the movie just didn't capture the elements of what made the books such a fantasy getaway. One too many brooding shots and a lack of development have left us with a style over substance affair. Obviously, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, so head to cinemas and find out for yourself if you really want to; however, with bad reviews across the board, there could be some particularly "dark" times ahead for this one.

(Source: IGN, Birth Movies Death, The Guardian, The Hollywood Reporter, Uproxx)