“The Dark Tower" is a Mountain of Missed Opportunities

Last weekend, it was 102 degrees (Fahrenheit) where I live. I know some of y’all are saying “102 degrees? Quit whining and call me when it’s 120.” I know, I know, I hear you. I used to live in an area where it regularly hit 115 in late August. But in the area where I live now, 102 is a historically high temperature, so most houses don’t have air conditioning and a lot of them are stuffy and have terrible air circulation. Plus, it can hit 60% humidity at the same time as being 102 degrees, so surviving isn’t trivial.

To survive these temperatures, I spent a Friday afternoon and an entire Saturday at the movies. I saw Wonder Woman for a second time on Friday (just as good as the first time) and hit the re-release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind on Saturday evening, but I needed something to see Saturday morning, and I was pretty much limited to seeing Spider-Man: Homecoming again or seeing The Dark Tower. I went with the latter, and yada yada yada, here’s a blog about how bad it was.

In case you haven’t seen The Dark Tower, I’m going to spoil it right away: Jake Chambers is a kid who sees visions in his dreams of a man in black and a faraway world. Everyone insists he’s crazy, including his concerned mom who is being pressured by his jerk stepdad Lon to put him in the booby hatch. His real father, Elmer, was a heroic firefighter who died and everyone thinks he’s just having issues. One day a man and a lady come from the nuthouse to take him away, but he notices their skin is sagging because they’re actually taheen, creatures with animal heads that resemble the Egyptian gods, but more disgusting. (Villains in Stephen King stories are always disgusting.) He executes an amazing parkour chase sequence across rooftops, similar to the one at the beginning of Casino Royale, except instead of being an international super spy who stops terrorism he’s a random kid who’s kind of weird. He escapes to the house in Dutch Hill where a wood monster attacks him, and then he goes through a portal into Mid-World, where he meets the Gunslinger, Roland Deschain, played by Idris Elba. Meanwhile, the Man in Black has discovered he’s a powerful psychic who can topple the Dark Tower and open the universe to the monsters living beyond reality, which he wants to do for some reason? Not really clear why. After walking around aimlessly for a while, Roland and Jake consult a seer in a village who convinces her entire village to do what Roland says because he’s a gunslinger, even though they all think it will lead to them all dying. It does in fact lead to them all dying, but that’s okay because Roland and Jake get what they need: they get back to Jake’s Earth and find the way to the Man in Black’s fortress, but only after the Man in Black kills Lon and Jake’s mom. The Man in Black kidnaps Jake and straps him into this big chair that makes a skybeam shoot at the Dark Tower. Roland charges in and kills everyone, including the Man in Black, and pulls Jake out of the chair. Since Jake’s family is all dead now, he goes off with Roland to adventure in Mid-World.

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of the books. I like them but they’re not perfect. But there’s two things the books are: they’re original, and they’re ambitious. This movie used exactly none of the really original or ambitious ideas that the books bring to the table. It was unoriginal and unambitious on every level. According to Stephen King, the books were his attempt to combine The Lord of the Rings with The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Guess what movie trilogy won like 50 Oscars back in the early 2000’s? That’s right, Lord of the Rings. Guess what movie is regarded as a classic that defines the entire spaghetti Western genre? That’s right, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Guess what The Dark Tower took as inspiration from either of those movies? Basically nothing. It’s as generic and plain vanilla as sci-fi action comes. More than either of those, it reminds me of the painfully boring 1996 film Crossworlds, starring Rutger Hauer way after Blade Runner, or even Ladyhawke. The visual style isn’t quite as boring as I remember Crossworlds being, but it resembles Lord of the Rings only in the way that every speculative fiction movie nowadays does. (At least, those that don’t resemble The Matrix.) The cinematography is perfectly serviceable but does nothing to stand out or enhance things. The soundtrack is sort of the elevator music version of the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. The Dark Tower books are supposed to be a mystical fantasy version of a spaghetti Western. You know what would’ve been really cool? Make it look and sound like a spaghetti Western, in a way that King couldn’t do with just text. Ennio Morricone is still around—get him to do some epic trumpet music. Don’t just do the kind of boring, generic gunfight that any two-bit action movie has—really bring some tension to these fights, like a good spaghetti Western. Even the books got this right, and doing a good fight in a book is really hard. Good fights are fast and exciting and reach for your hair-trigger reptile brain reflexes. Books are slow and ponderous and engage all your philosophizing frontal cortex functions. But the books still got this right.

That’s just on the technical side; the story was an even bigger waste. The first book was pretty self-contained, so I’m not sure why they felt the need to pull a Hobbit on it and make it more confusing by bringing in all these concepts that didn’t appear until later, like the taheen and the outer darkness. Both Roland and Jake lose a lot of the complexity they had in the books. One of the most significant moments of the first book is when Roland lets Jake fall to his death to get a chance at catching up with the Man in Black. It establishes Roland’s single-mindedness and also helps set the basis for his later relationship with Jake. Nothing like this ever happens in the movie. We never really find out why Roland hates the Man in Black or why he’s chasing him. We never find out what he feels so guilty about in the past, or why he feels so guilty about it. We never get a sense of the weight of tradition Roland was raised under, or the Spartan upbringing he had, and we never get a glimpse of what people in his world do when they’re not going on adventures to save all of existence. I understand that the book character was too complex to be fit in one movie and had to be cut down, but they cut down so much that there’s almost nothing left. Similarly, Jake in the books wasn’t just an average kid who was seeing weird visions while his concerned mom and his jerk stepdad wondered what to do. His parents were rich and so caught up in their own lives that they barely had time for him. He attended an upper-class private school that he hated, because his parents wanted to be able to brag to their friends about it. Jake found a new home in Mid-World and new family in Roland and the others not because his real family was all dead, or even because they didn’t love him, but because they weren’t really there for him.

This movie being so terrible pretty much wrecked any chances of seeing Eddie and Susannah on the big screen, or other interesting elements from the books like Lud, the Wolves, or Blaine the Monorail. Apparently they’re still pressing ahead with a TV series that will be based on the fourth book, Wizard and Glass, so there’s still a chance we’ll see Alain and Cuthbert, and maybe the people working on the TV series will have more sense about both technical and story elements, instead of trying to play it safe with one of the weirdest and most ambitious fantasy stories around.

I watched One-Punch Man. So there's that.

Since I’m so done with shounen action, I pretty much ignored all the buzz around One-Punch Man when it came out, but recently I finally deigned to watch it after talking with a big fan, and enjoyed it a lot.

I’d previously read the first volume of the manga, but the things that make One-Punch Man fun don’t come across well in black and white still images. It’s a wild, over the top parody of both typical shounen action and superheroes, but also manages to be a pretty competent shounen action / superhero series in its own right. The only similar show I’ve seen is Bobobo-bo-Bobobo, but One-Punch Man is funnier, easier to watch, and has better characters and action.

If you’re reading this (you’re not, I know), you probably know what One-Punch Man is about: an egghead baldy named Saitama who is so insanely powerful that he can take out any threat with one punch. Saitama is a refreshing take on the rock-headed, youthful heroes with a dream we see in a lot of shounen series: he’s got the same kind of airheaded nonchalance as Goku, but he’s already 25, didn’t start training until he was 22, pretty much fell into the whole hero business, and he has no idea why he’s so powerful and no particular end goal in his life. He does have a sort of moral code—in one scene, he sacrifices his own reputation so a group of people will honor the other, weaker heroes who died or took serious injury protecting them before he arrived. But his moral code isn’t what drives him. When the series starts, he’s a dilettante who saves the city from giant monsters and then rushes off to catch the sales at the grocery stores because he’s poor and doesn’t have a real job. His attitude and lifestyle remind me of someone living a hard-scrabble, rock-bottom life on purpose while trying to make it as an artist or a musician, except his art is punching the guts out of giant monsters.

A bunch of other heroes also make brief appearances: there’s Saitama’s sidekick Genos, a cyborg who is searching for the evil cyborg that murdered his parents. There’s a ton of others who work for the Hero Association, which ranks heroes and pays them with donations made by the people. Most of them are absurd. The most absurd, but also the one with the most oddly touching arc, is Mumen Rider, whose power is riding a bicycle. A lot of the other heroes are cowards and opportunists who duck out of taking on the tough challenges, but Mumen Rider is courageous to the point of idiocy, and the show achieves one of those classic manly tears moments that are the holy grail of all shounen fighting series when he throws himself at a monster that’s already taken out tons of far more powerful heroes just to buy some people a little more time to escape. Nearly as absurd is Puri-Puri Prisoner, a comedic gay stereotype who would no doubt be the subject of numerous outrage-pieces about how homophobic Japan is if anyone in the outrage media watched One-Punch Man. (Outrage media journalists: I charge a 10% finder’s fee on stuff to get outraged about. Call me if you’re interested in getting outraged about Puri-Puri Prisoner!) On the actually cool side, there’s Tornado, a green-haired loli with a bad attitude and telekinesis. The first time we see her in action, a Godzilla-like monster brags that it would take a meteor impact to kill him, so she grabs a meteor from space with her telekinesis and slams it into him.

One-Punch Man is actually surprisingly brutal. When Saitama punches something, it explodes in a giant fountain of guts and bones. The higher level heroes always fight to kill. The villains usually warrant it; more than one intends genocide against the human race, and the Sea King runs around the city killing indiscriminately and eating the victims. Combined with how the fluid animation creates a sense of speed and intensity, the fights recall the savage, beautifully animated battles that used to be common in 80’s anime.

Saitama’s overwhelming power and his impatience for lengthy villain backstories means that the story arcs are usually very short. Where Naruto or One Piece could easily blow through 12 episodes on a single fight between a minor villain and one of the B-team members, One-Punch Man makes it through five major villains and several minor ones in the same number. There’s a lot of action and enough dialogue to keep things fun, but not enough to get wearing. The snappy pace helps prevent the fatigue that can set in after watching two side characters alternately trade backstories and fight inconclusively for 17 hours.

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed One-Punch Man, especially after being unimpressed with the manga. It’s just not a series whose virtues come across well in static black and white panels. The medium of manga is suited to extremely long form stories, preferably ones with lots of expository dialogue (anything too clever or flashy benefits a lot from being spoken by an actor) and not a lot of action. The main strengths of One-Punch Man are action, which benefits a lot from the anime’s incredible fight animation, and funny dialogue that’s best delivered by a good actor. I’m glad I gave the anime a chance; it was funny, cool, and even had some feels, like Mumen Rider’s stand against the Sea King.