First, if you haven’t read Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series go and do that. It’s fantastic, and his greatest undertaking as a writer. It’s a massive western, science fiction, fantasy, met narrative that can get unwieldy, but is never boring. Then come back and check out the first trailer for The Dark Tower, the movie based on those books.
It honestly looks a bit different, but that’s probably necessary. To begin the movie is clearly not based solely on the first book of the series. It not only has characters that appear later on, but world hopping that takes quite some time to occur in the books. It also has some ridiculous looking action, which was never really a part of the book, but can be welcomed here I suppose.
I’d argue that these tonal changes are necessary given that the books veer into a very meta story line about everything King has ever written. There are, of course, hints at other King stories teased here, but from this trailer I don’t think we’re going there, and I don’t think we’ll be going to a lot of places the books go. It’s just too clean to get as weird as the books do. Can you see an insane, sentient monorail rolling around in this film universe? Not really.
I’m excited for this, but it definitely doesn’t feel like the books. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe not.
