How To Make Robocop 3 Look Like A Masterpiece: A 'Dark Tower' Review (30 Days of Stuff)

I'm not one for movie reviews. I haven't watched a Hollywood blockbuster in years because they either have too much or too little nudity for me to bother. However, when I found out that The Dark Tower was finally being adapted to screen, I knew this was one movie I'd definitely see at the cinema, or at least pirate.

Here's an interesting piece of information. Around a hundred years ago, Stephen King wrote a short novella called the Langoliers. From my memory, it was about 150 pages long. A few years later, it was given a three hour small screen adapation. The book dealt with the subject of flying monsters with chainsaw teeth who 'eat the past'.

Cut to 2017, and Stephen King has also written a sprawling epic fantasy saga which is 5000 pages long and boasts slightly less than a million words. Someone thought it would be a good idea to condense this down to a ninety minute film.

In all honesty, I expected to be thoroughly disappointed by this film. The only movies which don't leave me disappointed anymore are ones with a sticky finish, but going  to see the Dark Tower was like going to see Led Zeppelin and having a Led Zeppelin tribute band show up instead. Right from the off, the film was rife with passages from the first book ("there are other worlds than these") which were never meant to be anything more than cool lines delivered by a gun-toting maniac. Unfortunately, as is the same with IT ("we all float down here"), these quotes mean nothing in the grand scheme of the movies. "There are other worlds than these" means that no matter how many times a certain character dies, he's fated to adventure with The Gunslinger - something the film doesn't even address. "We all float down here" is a reference to IT's home planet; something which is later never even mentioned again.

But Hollywood, having some stupid obsession with taglines, have turned these irrelevant phrases into all-emcompassing motifs. When choosing a tagline for a film, at least pick something which hasn't been solely chosen to sell merchandise to idiots. I would rather a shit tagline than an irrelevent one.

Fuck yeah.

Secondly, if I hadn't spent fifteen years reading the source material, I wouldn't have a clue what was going on. Within the first ten minutes, the actions of the first three books are covered while at the same omitting all of the good shit that happens in each of them. In the third Dark Tower book, a homicidal train gets convinced to kill itself by a dick joke told by a tripping heroin addict. It might be one of the best scenes in literature. Nowhere in this film did this scene take place. Instead, Idris Elba meets some kid who I don't care about and they start shooting at Matthew McConaughey in some dessert with little explanation as to why, aside from vague mentions of 'The Tower'.

In a film which has the skills of Idris Elbow, Matthew McConaughey and 8 books of mad shit to draw on, it's surprising how a film can still manage to be this terrible. If I was a betting man, I would guess that a Hollywood executive had a bet with another Hollywood executive to make the shittest film possible and still convince people it was a genuine effort. In fact, almost everything good about the entire source material was left out. All they did was pick out the shit, boring parts and turn them into a movie. There's no mention of Eddie Dean, a crazy junkie who loves shooting shit impulsively. There's no mention of Odetta / Detta / Susannah - a disabled, split-personality vegetable who drops Wu Tang levels of N-bombs. There's even no mention of the Crimson King - the ultimate villain (above the one played by Matthew McConaughey).

In truth, there were some okay things about this film. The main characters are pretty good at what they do and some of the fight scenes weren't awful. However, as soon as I left the theatre I found myself having entirely forgot everything that happened and therefore struggled to write this review.

In summary: I wasted my time watching this movie so you didn't have to. Many people would consider me a hero. A lot of reviews out there are making stupid claims like the film was a decent effort to translate an unfilmable series of books into a movie. Here's an outlandish idea then: don't bother. Just leave things the fuck alone. Not everything has to be messed with until the point of irrelevance. In order to make up for lost time, I'm going to watch Terminator 2 three times in a row.

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By Joe Turner
@apocrypha87

Joe is what many people would refer to as a real piece of shit. He once lied about his whereabouts to get out of helping his friend move house and thinks a lot of blind people are faking it. He once auditioned to be a back up dancer for Shakira.

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