‘The Dark Tower’: How inescapably bad movie crushed Idris Elba
Idris Elba is one of those actors who always just seems way too cool for school, no matter what criticism is levelled at him. Even when racists derided the possibility of him being the next James Bond, he took it in his stride and simply said, ‘Not worth it’, though he would have been well within his rights to be majorly pissed off.
But like everyone else, there’s always a limit. At some point, the criticism can get to you, especially when your work is so deeply involved in the public realm, like cinema is. Although he tried to play it cool, Elba was still hurt by the sheer amount of criticism levelled at the 2017 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.
“I don’t tend to read reviews, but this was inescapable,” he told The New York Times, “And the reviews really beat it up. I didn’t take it personally, but I was like, ‘Ooof, that hurts.’” Playing the gunslinging lead protagonist in the adaptation, Elba was one of the only praiseworthy parts of the movie.
But still, it must hurt when something you’ve worked on – and that could have been such a success and franchise, if it was done right – falls flat on its face, and the world won’t let it be. Although it wasn’t Elba’s fault at all, nor the rest of the filmmaking crew, really. One of King’s most beloved stories, The Dark Tower is actually a series of eight books, a novella and a children’s book. This begins to explain why the 95-minute film didn’t really work. While it was planned as the beginning of a franchise, it simply tried to pack too much of a complex story into such a short time frame.
The film combined elements from several of the books into a single storyline but made a controversial change by shifting the focus from Roland, the last surviving gunslinger of an alternate universe and the books’ central character, played by Idris Elba, to 11-year-old Jake, who is actually a major side character in the novels. To make matters worse, the project spent 11 years in development purgatory, bouncing between major filmmakers like JJ Abrams and Ron Howard before landing with Nikolaj Arcel. Although Arcel had previously been nominated for an Oscar for his Swedish-language work, some questioned whether he was the right choice to handle the sprawling and complex world of The Dark Tower.
Howard stayed on as a producer, but even he conceded in the end that a lot of bad decisions had been made in regards to the film. As with so many movies, the pressure to make it a lucrative endeavour got in the way of it actually being a good film. According to Howard, the protagonist’s change, short length and deviation from the series’ horror elements were decisions motivated by what they thought the market wanted. It’s the perfect example of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, a concept that Hollywood seems to so frequently forget in its pursuit of profit.
King’s The Dark Tower is beloved for a reason, and really, they should have simply capitalised on that, even though it is long and complicated subject matter. Instead, they made my man Idris look like a fool and wasted what was a great casting choice.
Luckily, for fans of the books, long-term King collaborator Mike Flanagan couldn’t let this be the end. And so, a brand new adaptation has been in the works – yet again for a long time. But Flanagan seems adamant that the project is progressing.
This time it will be expanded into a TV series, which, as Howard retrospectively pointed out, seems much more fitting for this kind of source material. But sadly, it seems, Elba won’t be given the chance to redeem himself along with it.
