I fear the movie is Ka… Ka.
I’m witholding judgment until there are more reviews, but it seems like those involved have forgotten the face of their fathers 
There will be water if God wills it.
I predict a quick run-up to the clearing at the end of the path.
There’s two possibilities for the ending. Either Roland reaches the tower or he doesn’t. If he does, I think most fans will be disappointed that we didn’t get to see Eddie, Susannah, and Oy. If he doesn’t, that means we at least have some sequels coming out and we might get to see them.
I’m also puzzled by the inclusion of Pimli as one of the characters. I think the way King handled Pimli and Eddie in book 7 was terrible, and I hope Roland kills him in a particularly nasty way. None the less, what would be the purpose of having Pimli if there is no Eddie? I can’t imagine that he’ll kill Jake the way he did Eddie in the books. If that happens, I would walk out of the theatre right then and there.
Well, Pimli did serve some other functions in the plot. But the inclusion of characters from Book 7 does suggest that they are actually going to try to cover the whole series in one movie, which suggests that they have stopped smoking the devilweed and gone directly to chewing it. At least it doesn’t appear that Stephen King himself is going to be a major character in the movie, so there’s that.
But would she have the same name? Roland I guess does-would that extend to the others in the ka-tet, past or present? IIRC Eddie was the reincarnation, or at least echo, of Cuthbert.
I’m blown away if this is all accurate. I thought they were directly adapting book one. Disappointing.
I count two movies based on Stephen King books in my top ten movies of all time (Stand By Me and Shawshank Redemption). Though, admittedly both only loosely follow the books. And admittedly there are some absolutely terrible Stephen King movies.
I think the way that they are doing this, as a sequel that isn’t beholden to the books is promising, and probably better than doing it with devotion to the source material.
I’m optimistic.
Oh, I was just joking. The Green Mile is pretty good too. Just hopefully no more movies like Maximum Overdrive.
The Mist wasn’t too shabby.
The more I think about this, the more apprehensive I am. I can see not doing a completely faithful adaptation, but without Eddie, Susannah and Oy, it’s at best going to vaguely resemble the source material.
(Although it does resolve one issue I saw a lot of complaints about on less enlightened boards. Most of the objections to casting a black actor as Roland were just thinly disguised racism, but it did seem like it would drastically change the dynamic between Roland and Detta. I guess this solves the problem, in the same way that Jack Mort solved Odetta’s problem of finding nice shoes.)
I wonder if they’re even going to have Roland allow Jake to fall to his death. To me, that’s an absolutely crucial element to the series. By Book Seven, he is willing to sacrifice himself to save Jake. That possibility of moral development on Roland’s part is what keeps the revelation at the end of the series from being entirely depressing.
Well…I remind myself what King said when an outraged fan complained that some crappy movie adaptation “ruined” one of his books. (paraphrased) “The book wasn’t ruined. It’s right there on the shelf and has all the same words in the same order it did before the movie was released”.
This is not encouraging.
Neither are these.
The sucky part is that it will likely be at least 10 more years, if ever, before a proper adaptation is attempted [del]again[/del].
I skimmed over the review blurbs on the RT front page:
“…summons an emotional impact of close to zero…”
and
“…victim of trying to do too much and too little at the same time.”
Those were from the POSITIVE “Fresh” rated reviews.
A few questions about the movie adaptation:
Did a chick?
Dum a chum?
Dad a cham?
Ded a check?
I saw the film last night and yeah those reviews are accurate. It’s terrible. I’ve never read the series, I just had a basic idea of the story, and this film certainly does not make me want to pick up the books to get a better understanding of what the hell was going on.
When I first heard of the movie project, I worried about the casting of Idris Elba.
Turns out, according to the reviews at least, that was practically the only good decision the film-makers made.
Though in retrospect, his casting was a sign - an early sign that they were not going to attempt to actually follow the story in the book series (a Black Roland makes most of The Drawing of the Three difficult to film, as a major plot point is the racial tension between Roland and Odetta/Detta).
Which would I suppose have been fine … if they had a good story to tell instead. According to reports, they don’t.
I’m not going to see the movie in theaters, so I won’t mind a spoiler. In the trailer I just noticed that Roland says that the Man in Black destroyed his world, now he’s coming to Earth.
Is Roland an alien in this? I thought it was well established that the territories were a twin of Earth, differences but still our world. Did I miss something?
Well like I said, I had not read the books, so
Roland, The Man in Black, and the other people from their world who wear skin masks seemed like aliens to me as there was no explanation given as to who they were. I did wonder why they all looked human. They refer to Earth as “Keystone Earth,” but again there is no explanation as to what that means. So yeah I assumed they were aliens from some parallel dimension thing.