Breaking Down the Dark Tower Trailer Because I Am Complicit in Hollywood's Fanboy-Based Marketing Strategies

Such a huge part of the way Hollywood has co-opted nerd culture is the way that they have gotten people to gush about movies they haven't seen yet because it represents an adaptation of something that means something a lot to them and adapting it suggests a validation of that love.

So here I go!

While I think it's not supposed to officially release for a couple hours, some Youtube channel put up the Dark Tower trailer, and I watched it.

The trailer does some pretty heavy exposition - it explains Gunslingers, explains the Dark Tower's role explicitly (though it's important to far more than just Earth and Mid-World, Jake, but I get that we want to keep things relatively simple.)

We get three characters: Roland, the Man in Black, and Jake Chambers. The stakes are established (MiB wants to destroy the Tower, doing so would destroy both Earth and Mid-World.) So now let's get into the nitty-gritty.

In the books, there were always hints that Mid-World was a future version of our world - the fact that Jake, Susannah, and Eddie were all from different times kind of allowed for Roland to simply be from the far future. The movie seems to be steering more toward other world - there's an alien sky with a couple of enormous moons in one shot (I can't remember all the different moon names in the books, which I always interpreted to be different phases, but they could have just been different objects.)

Jake in the movie appears to be from our era, rather than the 1970s, which frankly is fine, because other than Susannah's (well, Odetta's) civil rights background, the eras didn't play a huge part in the plot (and you could easily make Odetta's activism something modern - though to be clear, it doesn't look like Susannah or Eddie are going to be in this movie, just as they weren't in the first book.)

Still, this is clearly not just a straight adaptation of the Gunslinger (for one thing, they've explicitly said this is a sequel to the series, not a straight adaptation, which if you've read the books is actually perfectly possible, and allows for big changes to the story without breaking the books' canon.)

The movie looks like it's borrowing elements from The Wastelands, as we see Jake already dealing with his psychologist misinterpreting his visions (and we get a little shout-out to Kubrick's version of the Shining, with a photo of the Overlook Hotel on the psychologist's desk - one of, I'm sure, a million references to other King works.) We also see the haunted house that serves as Jake's portal into Mid-World in that book, though the trailer implies this becomes a two-way gate that allows Roland to first travel to Earth.

Anyway, unless they go the Marvel route and release like three trailers, I think this is all we're going to get until the movie's summer release.