I guess the studio execs decided the American public wasn't smart enough to get Stephen King...you know, the Godfather of accessible fiction.
Seriously...
What in the wide, wide world of sports happened here?!!!!! Honestly, it's a King movie, it doesn't need to be good. I mean look at the body of work that was made that people actually would agree were good: The Dead Zone, The Green Mile, Stand By Me, Shawshank, Carrie (1976), and The Shining (arguably among fans).
6 movies...that's about it. The rest are mediocre, 1408, Cat's Eyes, Misery, Firestarter.
And the rest are low budget throw away films that can be enjoyed the same way that one can enjoy any B-Movie...and that's fine. I have a feeling that King appreciates B-Movies more than you'd think. At least that's what he wrote in "On Writing." But this...what the heck is this? Honestly, the Dark Tower series is one of my least favorite things that King has ever written...and I am a huge King fan...but even then, I didn't expect it to be this bad.
For starters, it's really not the Dark Tower. I mean, the characters are the same in name...but really in name only.
the Gunslinger is chasing the Man in Black...and that is all the similarities we have.
You can't blame the actors on this one. You can't blame the source material either, they are at least readable.
What you have here is a film that was re-written over and over and over and over again with, what I am guessing, is massive studio interference.
The series is already a big part of pulp culture, it already has a huge following...but watching this you get the feeling that some important people didn't understand that and had it rewritten a thousand time to try to make a franchise out of it, rather than use the franchise already in place. Only they wanted to make a franchise by putting the entire franchise into a single film.
In the end you can almost feel the different writers when you watch it. You can see where it was meant to go in one direction, then got taken in another, and then a third and a fourth until the actors were so confused they had no choice but to give up.
In the end, I got the impression that no one involved knew exactly what they were trying to make any longer.
Really, we should be demanding an instant remake and a total refund. Fans deserve no less.