The Dark Tower is important to me. I read Lord of the Rings early in High School and I've read the Song of Ice and Fire books... well, basically after the first season of the show came out. But the Dark Tower is hand-down the most influential and important fantasy series to me personally. I was wary of getting in to King's 2011 interquel, the Wind Through the Keyhole, but now that I've picked it up finally, I find myself falling back into and in love with the series.
Oh, it's certainly flawed. While I liked Wolves of the Calla a lot, I think the three-book series dismount was maybe rushed (King clearly wanted to finish it before he died after getting hit by that truck, but thankfully the man is still around and still writing, so perhaps he could have afforded to take more time.) I remember being nearly furious with the "Coda" ending after the ending that I had both expected and wanted had pretty much happened with the end of the "final" chapter (King does warn the reader, to be fair, that perhaps we should remain outside the Tower.)
While I've wanted a screen adaptation since reading the books, I've also grown to appreciate how difficult that would be to pull off. Game of Thrones has shown that television might be the better medium for adapting such enormous works, and while The Dark Tower books are perhaps not as dense as Martin's thousand-character epic, I'd still want to see proper time given to each character and not lose things like Roland's backstory, or the details of the World that has Moved On.
The project has been in development for so long that it's almost hard to believe it's actually happening.
Idris Elba as Roland certainly came as a bit of a surprise, given that the character as written is white. But looking at Elba's previous performances (I'm thinking John Luther particularly,) I can definitely see him pulling off the intense competence and callous pragmatism that makes Roland such a dangerous protagonist to friend and foe alike. This will certainly change his relationship with the Detta Walker half of Susannah's personality a bit, assuming she gets that same backstory, but overall, I'm really excited to see what Elba does with the role.
Matthew McConaughey as the Man in Black is, well, perfect. The odd thing here is I remember hearing that they were making a remake of The Stand and would be casting him as Randall Flagg, which again, is perfect, because they're the same person. Still, Walter O'Dim plays quite a different role from Flagg in this story (actually, that's confusing, because when he appears in Wizard and Glass he is going by the name Flagg, and possibly later in book seven,) but I think that if McConaughey can channel his Rust Cohle nihilism into aggressive malevolence (which shouldn't be hard,) I really think he should be perfect.
Beyond casting, though, what I wonder about is structure. On IMDB, there's no casting information for Eddie or Susannah, but there is for Jake, which suggests to me that they might truly be just doing The Gunslinger as the first movie.
That's a fine place to start, of course, and it's really important as a sort of groundwork-laying for the rest of the batshit crazy series, but it could certainly stand to be polished up a bit. I really wonder how closely the movie (hopefully movies - there's no telling how well it will do) will stick with the overall plot, especially since Wizard and Glass is a seven-hundred page book with a five-hundred page flashback, and at the end of book five, the existence of the series as a series of books becomes part of the plot itself. Also, Song of Susannah, if I remember correctly, doesn't really have much happening in it. And Drawing of the Three is basically an entire novel of character introductions.
I hope that it all works out, but I also don't really know how they could pull it off, let alone whether they will or not. I really hope they do.
I guess we'll find out next year.
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