Home Entertainment These new The Dark Tower character trailers and posters are still not easing my concern

These new The Dark Tower character trailers and posters are still not easing my concern

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I’ll be honest, my anticipation levels for the upcoming feature film adaptation of Stephen King’s epic fantasy The Dark Tower has gone from pretty high to rather dismal. Right now I would say they’re sitting somewhere between “unexpected dentist visit” and “getting back the results on a calculus exam”. My consternation stems from the film’s first trailer which really just didn’t look anything like The Dark Tower I read as a youngster. Yes, I’ve become that guy.

Now Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey are both top draw actors who can effortlessly carry a movie, and I actually like their casting as the gunslinger Roland and the evil Walter Paddick/The Man in Black respectively (I’m even okay with race-swapping Roland, despite the issues in the later narrative that it can cause). The problem is that for some reason director Nikolaj Arcel seems to think that these guys have been cast in a John Woo movie. If Chow Yun Fat was doing slow-mo power slides and reloading neon-glowing guns in mid-air, I would be cheering my arse off. But Roland Deschain of Mid-World? Yes, he could always do that super-speed reloading trick that would make a certain flashy comic book character jealous, but overall he’s supposed to be more Clint Eastwood than anything. And now he’s also apparently superhumanly strong? Sigh.

Or maybe I’m just getting old and curmudgeonly and this is my film critic equivalent of telling kids to GIT OFF MAH LAWN! Either way, I’ll let you guys decide for yourself as a trio of new previews have dropped – the first is just a general short trailer for the film, but the latter two are actually character-centric, focusing on Roland and the Man in Black and what makes them tick. And no, that last comment is not implying that they’re automatons but at this stage I wouldn’t be surprised by that third act plot twist.

Along with the trio of trailers, we also get two new character poster for the film’s two leads.

The Dark Tower is due for release on 28 July. It also stars Tom Taylor, Katheryn Winnick, Abbey Lee and Jackie Earle Haley. Here’s the official synopsis:

The Dark Tower series tells the story of Roland Deschain, Mid-World’s last gunslinger, who is traveling southeast across Mid-World’s post-apocalyptic landscape, searching for the powerful but elusive magical edifice known as The Dark Tower. Located in the fey region of End-World, amid a sea of singing red roses, the Dark Tower is the nexus point of the time-space continuum. It is the heart of all worlds, but it is also under threat. Someone, or something, is using the evil technology of the Great Old Ones to destroy it.

Last Updated: June 6, 2017

3 Comments

  1. RinceThis

    June 6, 2017 at 09:20

    It looks like something between Equilibrium and a gunslinger cowboy movie…

    Reply

  2. Original Heretic

    June 6, 2017 at 09:26

    Kervyn, if you’re being THAT guy, then I guess I’ll have to be than Anti-Guy. (and not in the Afrikaans sense….)
    I like how this is looking. A lot.
    And the fact that it’s completing the cycle, that it’s the sequel to the books, well, to me that means that we SHOULDN’T expect what we read, because this isn’t that tale.
    Plus, let’s also bear in mind, when King started writing these novels, he was young. Like 18 or something when he wrote the first one. So at that time, the cowboys were super heroes. Clint Eastwood was Captain America (or Captain Italy, with all those spaghetti westerns…).
    This is the more modern translation.

    Reply

  3. Miss T

    June 6, 2017 at 11:42

    Oh dear! Who are you and what have you done with Kervyn?! I do agree that it looks a wee bit too actiony but then I remember where they could possibly squeeze it into the books and there aren’t too many occasions that he actually uses his guns iirc. When I saw the trailer I thought it might be showing off a scene or two and didn’t take it to be the core of the movie. Now you are making me nervous!!! Go away! 😛

    Reply

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