By Emilio Frenk.
Director: Nikolaj Arcel
Cast: Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Taylor, Katheryn Winnick, Abbey Lee, Nicholas Hamilton, Claudia Kim, José Zúñiga, Dennis Haysbert and Jackie Earle Haley.
Rating: Poor.
Danish director Nikolaj Arcel, brings “The Dark Tower”, an action science fiction film that it is by far one of the biggest dissapointments of this summer.
Based on the novel series by Stephen King, the movie tells the story of Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) a young teenager that has frequent dreams about the Roland Deschain, also known as The Gunslinger (Idris Elbar) and The Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey) who are constantly fighting.
In the dreams there is involved a Dark Tower that holds the universe together. Every time that he wakes up he keeps telling his mother the same dream and she is in the point that doesn´t believe him.
One day Jake runs from people who try to abduct him and opens a portal that will lead him to another dimension where he will meet The Gunslinger.
Now both The Gunslinger and Jake will form an alliance to protect the Tower from The Man in Black who will not stop at anything to destroy it.
The Gunslinger and The Man in Black will collide in a battle between good and evil that will determine the faith of humanity.
The major problem that I saw in “The Dark Tower” is the screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner and Anders Thomas Jensen.
Again like I have mentioned so many times in this space there are a lot of creative differences when you have more than 2 writers involved in a projects, specially when is based in a novel of someone well known as Stephen King.
The screenplay lacked of detail, it was to predictable and the characters were to vague.
Honestly I have never read the books but I imagine there are far superior than this movie that had a A list cast in it with actors like Idris Elba and Mattew McConaughey.
So far their performances have been the worst I´ve seen from both stars and I felt the movie went on too fast.
If the Producers and Filmmakers thought that it would be a potential franchise with this film, we´ll I think they didn´t think through because of the timing of the film.
The best thing would have had a full length feature film focused in one of the novels and then you could have had a potential franchise.
Not everything is bad in “The Dark Tower”. I did like the performance of young Tom Taylor, who portrayed Jake Chambers in a very convincing way. This young actor has a brilliant future and I hope that he continues in this path.
Other things that I liked of the film where that there were some elements that were mentioned in films like “The Shawshank Redemption”, “1408” and “The Shining”. All of this movies of course come from Stephen King´s novels and I consider this elements a homage towards his work.
“The Dark Tower” could have been a movie with a huge potential and I felt that the talent was wasted and director Nikolaj Arcel didn´t knew took the best out of his cast and delivered weak performances.
With that being said “The Dark Tower” is one of the year´s most disappointing films and I cannot give a recommendation to it.