that train IS fucking crazy

oops that was for louddetective

Boy with a gun

The movie

You've done a good job of explaining why they should make Roland black.

Because Idris Elba, that's why.

Considering King's track record with films either a) being better then they deserve to be because a director removes him from the creative process entirely or b) King getting in there and making a righteous shit bolus due to his consistent meddling, the less he has to do with it on a brass tacks basis, the better.

You're probably right but Maximum Overdrive is still my favorite Stephen King adaptation.

Maximum Overdrive only works because it was written as a screenplay. If it was based on a 500 page long tome, you'd have to dance around the scene where Pennywise is burning down Halloran's nightclub, which is great in a novel but completely irrelevant to a movie.

Yeah this has a sort of Never-ending Story or Princess Bride thing going on. Pass

the train thing was one of the parts people talked about that made the books actually sound interesting. 'lord of the rings with cowboys' made me tune out, 'crazy demon train and weasel-headed people' made my ears prick up. so ymmv i guess.

I like Princess Bride and Neverending Story a lot but the difference here is that this wasn't made in the mid 80s and I'm not 10.

Oh I love Neverending Story and Princess Bride, but it's a different tone. And Time Bandits is one of my favorite movies but it did it too; basically a kid who is well aware that he or she walked through some portal or gate, and is fully aware of the differences between the worlds. It's been a while since I read any of them, but I re-read the Gunslinger every so often, and although the parallels are made between King's modern locations and events in our world, including King's own hit-and-run accident, or a Richard Bachman being mentioned in passing.. it's.. I dunno.. a lot more fringy and weird in its connections than this. Like for example, if you've read the Dark Tower you know that the number 19 is important. I won't give anything away but it makes for many of the connections completely autobiographical having to do with nothing but the age of the writer himself.. stuff like that. And I feel like someone like Noah Hawley could make the abstract work but this has Ron Howard plastered all over it, even though he's apparently backed out of doing anything more than producing the thing.

I wish to God they'd remake Neverending Story and leave all the Crowley in.

I'll have to read the book again, I didn't notice any Crowley but that's probably because it was years before I'd read any Crowley.

I've never read Neverending Story but was not aware it had a bunch of Crowley in it??

The crazy suicidal train was the best part

Books 1-3 or 1-4 maybe are the best. Probably 1-3. Much like Glen Cook's The Black Company, which goes on for 10 books.

Although, just like the Black Company, you'll be too invested not to finish the rest.

Read a couple. Right around when you're getting really curious how it all ends (maybe thinking, "Not a bad world you're unfolding here, King!"), stop reading. Never pick them up again. That wonder shall surely exceed the payoff on offer. 100%

They range from cool to okay to bad. The Gunslinger, Drawing of the Three, and Wolves of the Calla were my favs. Calla is a cool enough western with robots and dimensional gateways story that I didn't notice the lack of violence until the end when the cheesiest gunfight ever happens.

Avoid the last book in the series, it is phoned in harder than the end of Lawnmower Man.

The first three are really solid. A kind of weird, meditative fantasy totally out of character with most of King's novels. They're mostly character pieces with very little of the explosiony/bang bang/CGI weirdness present in this trailer (which doesn't remotely resemble the tone of the books at all). 4 starts to push the series into a more fantasy world dynamic with more weird shit and LOTR style complexity, which is not a bad thing, but from book 5 onwards I think King just had no idea where the take the series or how to end it. And then he pulled that nonsense of retconning several of his older books into the Flagg universe and attempting to create a unified world for most of his books that somehow connects to the Dark Tower and it just gets so pretentious and dumb.

It's entirely possible this movie might be good as a stand-alone adventure story, but it doesn't seem to be an adaptation of the series' core in any way whatsoever.

I think whether you should read the books depends entirely upon your tolerance for King doing his best Tolkien impression... and how much time you spend reading. If you read every night and can burn through books quickly, I'd say go for it. If it would take you a year to make it through all of them, I'd say that you could likely get a little more out of that time by reading other stuff.

Everyone above has valid criticisms. I read them all back to back and I was a little bored by the end of it all, but the world was weird enough to sustain me. There are some really cool fantasy moments and, as mentioned previously in here, a cool atmosphere. There is a lot of good stuff scattered through the series, but lots of content that feels like filler. I liked Roland well enough as a character, but I didn't really enjoy any of his companions. I've also read a good portion of King's other books, so the references were kind of entertaining.

If it contextualizes it, I really enjoyed The Black Company for similar reasons: interesting, violent, nightmare world and some creative monsters/villains, etc. I also read Dark Tower in the midst of a two year dark fantasy binge, so my tolerance was high at the time.

It's like L. Ron Hubbard's fiction, only not actively trying to create a religion. There's a religion in there, but it's not something the grognards have put into practical application.

Yet.

An old coworker of mine had a very compelling and well supported theory that Stephen King didn't write a single good book after he quit smoking cigarettes (around when Needful Things was in progress I think, definitely late 80s or early 90s), which pretty much lines up with when I completely gave up on him as a young fan although It was the first one I gave up on in the middle out of boredom) and the opinions on the Dark Tower series (I never really got in to them at all so I don't know firsthand) seem to support that.

Or typing 'realism' critiques so furiously and lengthy that they're bleeding from their fingers.

did you get checked for lyme?

BAZAAR CLOSED >:(

It appears you are spot on. There's already a follow-up TV series in production.

I'm just glad someone remembered to shoot a few blue lasers into the sky so that I know it's a fantasy/sci-fi/action movie...

OH ITS BAAAAAD

Five for shithouse.