The Dark Tower - In need of a 'shared universe'

It seems that every film studio is trying to create their own 'shared universe' in the hope of recapturing some of Disney's success with their Marvel superhero film franchise.  Most clones seem to fall at the first hurdle, let alone embark on a ten year run of dominating the Box Office. 'The Dark Tower' is a Stephen King adaptation that - not that you'd know it from the film itself - actually brings together many of his other books into - yes - a 'shared universe.'

Since watching the film, I've seen online that 'The Dark Tower's' source material spans numerous different horror stories and links them all together.  You'd think that the film-makers would therefore want to utilise this rich and expansive set of back stories to create something truly memorable and long-lasting.  What they did was produce a 'by-the-numbers' action/sci-fi film which lasts only about ninety minutes.

According to the opening scenes there's a big tower in another dimension and if 'evil' destroys it then the world (or worlds?) ends...  or something.  But, luckily, we're introduced to a boy (Tom Taylor) in our world who magical and one of those 'chosen ones' that films always have.  He has the power to... do stuff that will save us all.  He quickly meets up with Idris Elba's character 'the gunslinger' who is also on a mission to save stuff and kill Matthew McConaughey who wants to destroy the tower.

What follows is the writers condensing an entire series of books into less than ninety minutes.  It's like the film should have been twenty hours long and you're watching it on DVD skipping chapters and only watching a minute or so from every hour.  The story flies along and things just happen in order to get to the next action set piece.

Elba and McConaughey are both great with what they're given to work with.  I hear the film went through reshoots to 'flesh out' Elba's character.  I can only imagine what little amount of screen time he had BEFORE the extra footage was added!  The boy himself is also pretty good considering his age and he actually excels when he's called on to really act out a dramatic scene.

The special effects and fight scenes are also well done and, despite the obvious use of computer-effects are interesting and believable enough to look like they belong in a film with a much higher budget.

I didn't hate 'The Dark Tower,' but then I certainly won't be watching it again.  Maybe it was actually 'worse than bad' because it wasn't a terrible film, only frustrating.  It was hard to watch because I was sure that there was a great story in there somewhere, but it wasn't given the opportunity to flourish or given the treatment it deserved.  It's probably meant to have a sequel, but the lack of Box Office presence means that that will probably never happen.

6/10 May just keep you awake if Freddy Krueger was haunting your nights