The Dark Tower Movie: 5 Biggest Mistakes It's Already Made
It wouldn't be a Stephen King adaptation if it hadn't made any.
The Dark Tower's road to cinema has been almost as arduous as Roland Deschain's dimension-jumping journey across the pages of Stephen King's magnum opus.
The sprawling epic has endured delays, reshoots, directorial departures and false starts, but Idris Elba's hardboiled Gunslinger will finally reach theatres next month, hot on the heels of Matthew McConaughey's Man in Black.
King's novels introduced us to Mid-World, a magical, quasi-Old West with chilling echoes of our own reality that has succumb to post-apocalyptic ruin.
Playing out across seven core books, the story follows a lone cowboy-knight on a mission to save an entire nexus of worlds from destruction, teaming up with a motley crew of heroes he calls his "Ka-tet" along the way, and battling threats plucked from one end of the pop culture spectrum to the other.
Dark Tower is basically what you get when you throw Lord of the Rings into a blender with The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, a pinch of Arthurian legend, a dollop of Stephen King horror and countless other sources of inspiration.
It also plays out across 4,250 pages... so it's easy to appreciate the challenges Nikolaj Arcel and his creative team have faced in bringing this monstrosity to celluloid.
Plenty of trailer footage is out there in the wild, and while we don't wish to bury Roland before he's bullet-riddled and dead, the fans already have cause to be worried.
5. The Tone Is All Wrong
We're not going to deny that it's all kinds of awesome watching Idris Elba draw and fire his guns in Matrix-esque slow motion.
It is, obviously - but Dark Tower's trailers are tonally closer to a superhero blockbuster than the weird Western-fantasy-horror hybrid Stephen King spent a lifetime crafting.
To do the books justice, Dark Tower should be, well, dark. A grittier Lord of the Rings with strong elements of horror and gunfights straight out of a Spaghetti Western.
Instead, Roland's firearm capabilities are showcased like some kind of superpower and every minute footage so far smacks of PG-13-rated action-blockbuster.
Where's the weirdness, where's the surrealism? The Western influences? What we could have on our hands here is a watered-down Dark Tower, a simplified battle between good and evil where there's no room for grey morality.
A film that's forgotten the face of its father? Let's hope not.