Lost in Transcription: When book to movie goes very wrong by Randi Drew

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from a friend, who’s analytical critique is top-notch. She is a writer and DM, creator of worlds, and destroyer of the artless translations of literature to film. The post has been edited with a light touch for grammar and clarity. This review contains spoilers.

I’m sure a lot of you remember the joy of getting to read a book in class and then as a treat, getting to see the movie later on in the same class. Book-to-movie adaptations can be really joyous. They can also be incredibly horrific hatchet jobs depending on who takes our beloved books and what they do with them.

This is still something I indulge in as an adult. I have treated myself to many a book-turned-movie adaption. But I’d like to write about a really horrific one and why it became so horrific in the first place.

Let’s start with the fact that I am a definite Stephen King junkie. I attribute Stephen King and a small Pantheon of horror and sci-fi writers to be the contributing factors to why I kept reading as a teenager. The Dark Tower series by Stephen King was specifically a contributing factor to this. It’s was an iconic series for me that finished in my mid-twenties. A singular book that had been inspired by a poem, it did not intend to become Stephen King’s magnum opus as far as a book series goes. It’s so beloved that it’s spawned artwork, a revisiting through comics, a potential television miniseries, and of course the Dark Tower movie.

That’s why we’re here.

This is what gets me—I was pumped to see a Dark Tower movie, even through all of the minor controversies that had been spawned filming The Dark Tower. For the record, Idris Elba made a fantastic Roland Deschain even if the script wasn’t going to allow him to be a fantastic Roland. It was poorly written. Elba deserved so much better, so did Roland.

My problem with The Dark Tower can be traced back to one major singularity. This movie was a two-hour run that was supposed to concentrate an entire series of books. Lengthy and complex books. The start of that was an Achilles heel to the entire foot race. We’ve seen other movies do this too—Queen of the Damned combined the plot lines of The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned books and condensed them into one two hour movie. It was a huge dumpster fire of inaccuracies that still makes me livid, even if Aliyah was the perfect Akashka.

The only time I’ve seen anybody really do this successfully is Peter Jackson with Lord of the Rings. There were still some minor problems that most people who followed the books were fair about pointing out. Even so, I think Jackson knew on an intrinsic level that there is so much world building and content involved in something like the Lord of the Rings that you can’t contain the entire book series into a 2-hour movie. You can, however, put that into several two-hour movies. And it works! It had everything it needed and people still kept coming back.

Maybe it’s lack of patience on the part of a director and scriptwriter, or maybe it’s something else. Often with movies, we see multiple interested parties (typically financial backers) stick their hands into the pot, which often contributes to conflicts of interest on set. Some of the financial investors that are demanding specific things for a movie timeline may or may not understand the specific world that they are recreating through Cinema. Maybe at a deeper level they don’t understand that drawn-out content needs a procession of events to build world and its characters. Whatever the case, it causes a complex story to be boiled down, stretched out, and chopped up until it’s not quite recognizable by its own fan base.

In the case of Roland’s universe, the story is built on many worlds and layers. One of the more famous quotes in the book series is when Jake tells Roland to go on after his death, because there are other worlds than these. On some level Jake understands that Roland will meet him again on one of the overlapping worlds or timelines that Roland seems to cross in his pursuit of Walter, the Man in Black. There is also the idea that Roland has done this multiple times before, and will continue to do so stretching on to Infinity. This is something that comes up towards the end of the series, but is constantly hinted at through specific instances of Roland’s travels.

It’s hard to even go into the casting decision of who plays Walter in this movie. Matthew McConaughey was a very poor choice to cast as Walter. Part of this is because Matthew McConaughey really turned up the cheese level on things. He is able to be somewhat creepy as Walter, but in general he misses his mark.

Walter by his very nature is a creepy wizard. It’s hinted that Walter might be somewhat ageless as he uses his magic for a lot of nefarious purposes. He appears under many monikers in King’s universe. He’s appeared in Eye of the Dragon, it’s hinted that he’s Randall Flagg in The Stand. In many instances, he crops up to cause the world to decay a little more through the use of chaos, which is what the Red King wants. Walter’s whole purpose is to bring down the Beam in the entire book series (see the trope Some Guys Just Want to Watch the World Burn), and my issues with how Walter was even handled and set up as a bad guy for this movie was that they do not explain much of this.

At one point Walter is using one of the orbs that are present through the worlds that Roland and his ka-tet visit, specifically the pink orb from the fourth book, Wizard and Glass. It never goes into the orbs or their abilities, their use by the Red King and the denizens of the Dark Tower, or even how Walter got that orb in the first place—which is all a huge part of the Dark Tower universe. It’s primarily the story in book four.

I could go on for days about specific discrepancies, but I feel like at some point it is beating a dead horse. The problem with a lot of these things is that we are talking about building on or recreating a pre-established world with specific Rules of Engagement. In writing, the continuity of our universe is absolute. Writers establish the rule of law: how this universe and the characters within it are to relate to one another. When we take pre-established universes and begin to chip away at foundational work, it’s not just an undermining to that universe, it’s the unraveling of a story.

What’s left of the story at that point is patched back together and brought to a wider audience, but, in doing so we lose important themes and aspects of unique storytelling. The worst part of this is, the story itself ceases to have meaning or make sense. Character development and personalities are also a casualty of this, because instances where characters could be more fleshed out to explain behaviors, mannerisms, history, etc., are pretty much tossed out with the bathwater. Rivalries and romantic tension make less sense, as do angst, love, attachment, or fears. At that point history is also irrelevant.

As a writer and a DM this is something that drives me up the wall. It’s something akin to having numbers missing in a formula, or even going as far as to not have an ingredient in a recipe. We miss key interactions with characters and their environments. This causes inconsistencies with psychological development and history. I’m sure I seem incredibly high strung at this point, but is it really so unreasonable to have the rules of the universe defined so that things make sense to our readers? Or as Mr. King so eloquently and lovingly calls them, the Constant Reader.

They deserve our best stories.

At one point Walter is using one of the orbs that are present through the worlds that Roland and his ka-tet visit, specifically the pink orb from the fourth book, Wizard and Glass. It never goes into the orbs or their abilities, their use by the Red King and the denizens of the Dark Tower, or even how Walter got that orb in the first place. which is all a huge part of the Dark Tower universe, spoiler, it’s primarily the story in book four.

I could go on for days about specific indiscrepancies, but I feel like at some point, it is beating a dead horse. The problem with a lot of these things is that we are talking about building on or recreating a pre-established world with specific Rules of Engagement. In writing, the continuity of our universe is absolute. Writers establish the rule of law, how this universe and the characters within it are to relate to one another. When we take pre-established universes and begin to chip away at foundational work, it’s not just an undermining to that universe, it’s almost the unraveling of a story.

What’s left of the story at that point is patched back together and brought to a wider audience, but, in doing so we lose important themes and aspects of unique storytelling. The worst part of this is, the story itself ceases to have meaning or make sense. Character development and personalities are also a casualty of this, because instances where characters could be more fleshed out to explain behaviors, mannerisms, history, Etc are pretty much tossed out with the bathwater. Rivalries and romantic tension make less sense, as do angst, love, attachment, or fears. At that point history is also irrelevant.

They deserve our best stories.