An immense shape, like a floating fortress in the mist, looms over the city. At times, it vanishes completely, masked by a curtain of seaside clouds.
When the midday sun breaks through, the gray cliffs and sky-scraping flattop resemble the ruins of impossible ancient architecture. This is Table Mountain, dominating the skyline of Cape Town, South Africa, and in its shadow, another monolith is rising — the film version of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.
The six-guns-and-sorcery saga currently spans eight novels, comic books and short stories, and is woven throughout King’s larger body of bestsellers. It’s a genre mash-up of fantasy, sci-fi, westerns, horror, and mystery, set in a world — or worlds, plural — that are as endless as any built by J.R.R. Tolkien, George Lucas, and J.K. Rowling.
But really, the story comes down to something fairly simple, expressed in the opening line of King’s first book in the series, which will also open the movie: The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
For those new to the tale, it’s largely set in a dimension called Mid-World, where the apocalypse has already come and gone — and now rolls toward our own like a breaking wave. For Constant Readers who are already steeped in King’s lore, director and co-writer Nikolaj Arcel’s movie (which debuts in theaters Feb. 17) will remix the novels much the way superhero movies often draw from decades of comics mythology to create a new cinematic origin story.
The same stones, but a different structure.
BEHOLD, A GUNSLINGER
Standing on the horizon of this otherworldly landscape is Idris Elba’s Roland Deschain — The Gunslinger — a frontier version of a medieval knight who is thirsting for revenge and haunted by visions of a tower that is surrounded by a field of dusky pink roses. He doesn’t fully understand what it means. No one does.
“When we meet Roland he’s a bit lost,” says Elba, sitting in the sun during a break from one of the movie’s dungeon-like sets. “He’s been walking around for a long time, so he definitely feels like a man who’s… coiled.”
In the parlance of King’s books, Roland “has forgotten the face of his father.” “That’s a sense of, ‘You’ve forgotten your purpose,’” Elba says. At the start of the film, Roland is driven by rage, but deep down he is something else. “He’s a protector,” Elba says. He just needs something to reawaken that part of himself.
Off in the distance is his quarry: Matthew McConaughey’s Walter, a.k.a. The Man in Black, a charismatic warlock who decimated Mid-World, is responsible for destroying everyone Roland loved, and is looking for more worlds to end. Bringing down the Tower is one way to end them all at once. (EW will be getting to him in Part II of our Dark Tower coverage today.)
Walter is searching for someone, too – a teenager named Jake Chambers (15-year-old Tom Taylor, in his first film role), who lives in our world and possesses “The Shine,” a powerful psychic ability that King readers should recognize backwards or forwards. Jake’s extraordinary magic could help Walter break the ethereal beams that keep the Tower standing and maintain order in the multiverse.
For Roland, protecting this boy could restore his nobility, putting him back on the path to protecting the Tower itself. “Until he meets Jake, he doesn’t have anything to believe in, really,” Elba says. “He’s really pent up and releases his soul through [defending] the boy.”
THE FACE OF A HERO
One obvious change from the novels is the fact that Roland has always been depicted as a white man with blue eyes, although to Elba that change is no deeper than a layer of skin.
As we sit outside his trailer, watching as the shape of Table Mountain vanishes and reappears in the mist overhead, we talk of Stephen King’s reaction to his casting, which was: “I love it. I think he’s a terrific actor, one of the best working in the business now.”
Elba smiles. Roland doesn’t smile much, but King’s words seem to nudge him.
“I was thrilled. I was thrilled to get this job,” Elba says. “I was thrilled because, you know, it’s an alternative to what you could say, what Roland is described as.”
I ask him if he means a white guy, and Elba shrugs. It’s more than that. “A white guy in a sense, but, also just that you could make a version of this film that appealed to a slightly more action-hero type character and I don’t do those films. I haven’t done many actions films,” he says. “I like to bring a little depth and bring a real character. And what’s been fun is, Nik’s really up for that. So we do takes that are a little bit more commercial, if you like, and we do takes that are f—ing deep, like we’re making an independent film. It’s an iconic character. I want to get it right.”
With Hollywood still struggling with diversity and inclusion, exemplified by the #OscarsSoWhite controversy this year, his casting in the role does seem to be freighted with extra significance. I asked Elba if he considers the race-swapping of the character to be a big deal.
“It’s better just to treat it like no big deal,” Elba answers. “There should be no difference. The character that was written in Stephen’s imagination, it could be any color. It just happens to be me and, you know? In the artwork, it just so happens to be a white guy, but I don’t think that makes any difference. … I think what’s great about it, if I want to say anything about it, is that it is a sign of the times in terms of a colorless society. People go, ‘A good actor is a good actor,’ you know?”
A SCENE OF STEALTH
Roland stands on a rooftop, the wind rustling his floor-length duster. A small camera and sound crew orbits him as he steps through a shattered window into a hallway, seeping with rainwater.
In the movie, this is the roof of the Dixie Pig, a way station in New York City where creatures from the nether can gather, disguise themselves as humans, and head out to prey. In real life, it’s Werdmuller Centre, a decomposing former shopping mall in southeast Cape Town, which has been converted into a hive of horrors for The Dark Tower.
The plaster stalactites crying droplets from the ceiling are real, but it’s hard to know if the graffiti smearing the walls is set-design or just another natural phenomenon of abandonment.
The actors lurking in the shadows ahead are Taheen, demonic, half-human creatures with animalistic qualities — but they are currently in our world. They disguise themselves as human beings with rubbery masks, but their true identities are given away by a scar-like red seam running down the sides of their necks.
As he ventures down the hallway, Roland emerges into a room dangling with what appear to be hundreds of scalps — the long clusters of hair drooping down and swaying in the breeze like spider legs.
Really, they’re just wigs the Taheen can choose from when they need to venture beyond the walls of the Dixie Pig. Thinking the Gunslinger is distracted by the strange sight, a fiend leaps from the corner and is promptly dispatched by a swing from the butt of Roland’s revolver. He doesn’t shoot. He’s not trigger-happy. His revolvers fire only when necessary.
“He’s just very efficient in that sense,” Elba says. “You know, if he can clear a room with five bullets as supposed to six, he will.”
From the Hall of Hair, Roland slips into another room as his infiltration of the Dixie Pig continues. This bare, concrete walled torture chamber has a single dentist chair in the middle, rimmed by a corona of blood. Whoever – or whatever – died here, died badly.
A doughy, middle-aged man (who is not really a man) mops up quietly. He has a thick red line running down one side of his neck. Roland is poised to draw, but sends the lowly monster scurrying with a single, unbroken stare instead. Very Eastwood.
This Taheen is not interested in tangling with a Gunslinger. Roland is the last of their kind, a group of warriors who wielded six-guns but were really guided by something else, something unknowable. Think of the spiritual side of a samurai – or the Force-sensitivity of a Jedi, from yet another galaxy altogether.
“There’s a mystical element to him,” Elba says during his break between scenes. “He’s about 200 years old. He’s been around for a long time, and has a deep-rooted connection with the [supernatural] nature of the film. Roland’s completely tuned into that. When you meet him, he’s very much a stoic man, doesn’t want to talk. But when you get to know him, he really knows quite a bit about the world and his world’s history.”
Elba stares up at the shape of Table Mountain, which has reappeared from behind the shifting morning clouds.
“And he very much knows the way The Man in Black works. He’s so clued up on that, which is what frustrates him,” the actor says. “Because he can’t catch him.”
So, uh, am I the only one kinda put off by Roland's getup in these shots?
It's so .... shiny black leather. Like he's an X-Men gliding through the fucking Matrix. Roland should be brown, dusty, weather-beaten and sun-bleached.
Hopefully it works once it's actually a film and not just stills in a stupid magazine.
11.23.63 the book was pretty good. I doubt this was intentional but it actually comes off like someone playing a video game, which is pretty interesting to me.
Actually, it's a pretty weird King. The metafiction (which is great) comes up early, the ending is excellent, and it's the middle that is overlong and overboring. Go figure.
This is just the Stephen King thread now, right?
11.22.63 is one of my favorite King books, maybe its because he (well his son) nails the ending. I can't think a book in a while that was more of an emotional read for me, and really had me working through a lot of feelings over the loss of my mother when i was younger. At its core the book represented to me the idea of a want or need to change the past due to some great loss, but that its something that you can't do. In the end
Epping had to be okay with how things were, and that was also okay, if not a little heartbreaking.
Read it twice and it got to me both times.
+1
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
11.23.63 the book was pretty good. I doubt this was intentional but it actually comes off like someone playing a video game, which is pretty interesting to me.
Actually, it's a pretty weird King. The metafiction (which is great) comes up early, the ending is excellent, and it's the middle that is overlong and overboring. Go figure.
This is just the Stephen King thread now, right?
11.22.63 is one of my favorite King books, maybe its because he (well his son) nails the ending. I can't think a book in a while that was more of an emotional read for me, and really had me working through a lot of feelings over the loss of my mother when i was younger. At its core the book represented to me the idea of a want or need to change the past due to some great loss, but that its something that you can't do. In the end
Epping had to be okay with how things were, and that was also okay, if not a little heartbreaking.
Read it twice and it got to me both times.
11.22.63 spoilers
It's kind of fascinating because by the end of the book he's done some living but accomplished nothing. The arc of the end is to undo everything he's done. Had he shunned mystery and decried ambition from the very beginning, the world would have been no different. The engine of the story is to erase its own importance.
Technically, since Stephen King is a character in DT, every book he's written is on-topic...
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
11.23.63 the book was pretty good. I doubt this was intentional but it actually comes off like someone playing a video game, which is pretty interesting to me.
Actually, it's a pretty weird King. The metafiction (which is great) comes up early, the ending is excellent, and it's the middle that is overlong and overboring. Go figure.
This is just the Stephen King thread now, right?
11.22.63 is one of my favorite King books, maybe its because he (well his son) nails the ending. I can't think a book in a while that was more of an emotional read for me, and really had me working through a lot of feelings over the loss of my mother when i was younger. At its core the book represented to me the idea of a want or need to change the past due to some great loss, but that its something that you can't do. In the end
Epping had to be okay with how things were, and that was also okay, if not a little heartbreaking.
Read it twice and it got to me both times.
11.22.63 spoilers
It's kind of fascinating because by the end of the book he's done some living but accomplished nothing. The arc of the end is to undo everything he's done. Had he shunned mystery and decried ambition from the very beginning, the world would have been no different. The engine of the story is to erase its own importance.
11.22.63 spoilers
That part for me was really tragic. Everything he went through, the people he helped and hurt, just undone.
An immense shape, like a floating fortress in the mist, looms over the city. At times, it vanishes completely, masked by a curtain of seaside clouds.
When the midday sun breaks through, the gray cliffs and sky-scraping flattop resemble the ruins of impossible ancient architecture. This is Table Mountain, dominating the skyline of Cape Town, South Africa, and in its shadow, another monolith is rising — the film version of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.
The six-guns-and-sorcery saga currently spans eight novels, comic books and short stories, and is woven throughout King’s larger body of bestsellers. It’s a genre mash-up of fantasy, sci-fi, westerns, horror, and mystery, set in a world — or worlds, plural — that are as endless as any built by J.R.R. Tolkien, George Lucas, and J.K. Rowling.
But really, the story comes down to something fairly simple, expressed in the opening line of King’s first book in the series, which will also open the movie: The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
For those new to the tale, it’s largely set in a dimension called Mid-World, where the apocalypse has already come and gone — and now rolls toward our own like a breaking wave. For Constant Readers who are already steeped in King’s lore, director and co-writer Nikolaj Arcel’s movie (which debuts in theaters Feb. 17) will remix the novels much the way superhero movies often draw from decades of comics mythology to create a new cinematic origin story.
The same stones, but a different structure.
BEHOLD, A GUNSLINGER
Standing on the horizon of this otherworldly landscape is Idris Elba’s Roland Deschain — The Gunslinger — a frontier version of a medieval knight who is thirsting for revenge and haunted by visions of a tower that is surrounded by a field of dusky pink roses. He doesn’t fully understand what it means. No one does.
“When we meet Roland he’s a bit lost,” says Elba, sitting in the sun during a break from one of the movie’s dungeon-like sets. “He’s been walking around for a long time, so he definitely feels like a man who’s… coiled.”
In the parlance of King’s books, Roland “has forgotten the face of his father.” “That’s a sense of, ‘You’ve forgotten your purpose,’” Elba says. At the start of the film, Roland is driven by rage, but deep down he is something else. “He’s a protector,” Elba says. He just needs something to reawaken that part of himself.
Off in the distance is his quarry: Matthew McConaughey’s Walter, a.k.a. The Man in Black, a charismatic warlock who decimated Mid-World, is responsible for destroying everyone Roland loved, and is looking for more worlds to end. Bringing down the Tower is one way to end them all at once. (EW will be getting to him in Part II of our Dark Tower coverage today.)
Walter is searching for someone, too – a teenager named Jake Chambers (15-year-old Tom Taylor, in his first film role), who lives in our world and possesses “The Shine,” a powerful psychic ability that King readers should recognize backwards or forwards. Jake’s extraordinary magic could help Walter break the ethereal beams that keep the Tower standing and maintain order in the multiverse.
For Roland, protecting this boy could restore his nobility, putting him back on the path to protecting the Tower itself. “Until he meets Jake, he doesn’t have anything to believe in, really,” Elba says. “He’s really pent up and releases his soul through [defending] the boy.”
THE FACE OF A HERO
One obvious change from the novels is the fact that Roland has always been depicted as a white man with blue eyes, although to Elba that change is no deeper than a layer of skin.
As we sit outside his trailer, watching as the shape of Table Mountain vanishes and reappears in the mist overhead, we talk of Stephen King’s reaction to his casting, which was: “I love it. I think he’s a terrific actor, one of the best working in the business now.”
Elba smiles. Roland doesn’t smile much, but King’s words seem to nudge him.
“I was thrilled. I was thrilled to get this job,” Elba says. “I was thrilled because, you know, it’s an alternative to what you could say, what Roland is described as.”
I ask him if he means a white guy, and Elba shrugs. It’s more than that. “A white guy in a sense, but, also just that you could make a version of this film that appealed to a slightly more action-hero type character and I don’t do those films. I haven’t done many actions films,” he says. “I like to bring a little depth and bring a real character. And what’s been fun is, Nik’s really up for that. So we do takes that are a little bit more commercial, if you like, and we do takes that are f—ing deep, like we’re making an independent film. It’s an iconic character. I want to get it right.”
With Hollywood still struggling with diversity and inclusion, exemplified by the #OscarsSoWhite controversy this year, his casting in the role does seem to be freighted with extra significance. I asked Elba if he considers the race-swapping of the character to be a big deal.
“It’s better just to treat it like no big deal,” Elba answers. “There should be no difference. The character that was written in Stephen’s imagination, it could be any color. It just happens to be me and, you know? In the artwork, it just so happens to be a white guy, but I don’t think that makes any difference. … I think what’s great about it, if I want to say anything about it, is that it is a sign of the times in terms of a colorless society. People go, ‘A good actor is a good actor,’ you know?”
A SCENE OF STEALTH
Roland stands on a rooftop, the wind rustling his floor-length duster. A small camera and sound crew orbits him as he steps through a shattered window into a hallway, seeping with rainwater.
In the movie, this is the roof of the Dixie Pig, a way station in New York City where creatures from the nether can gather, disguise themselves as humans, and head out to prey. In real life, it’s Werdmuller Centre, a decomposing former shopping mall in southeast Cape Town, which has been converted into a hive of horrors for The Dark Tower.
The plaster stalactites crying droplets from the ceiling are real, but it’s hard to know if the graffiti smearing the walls is set-design or just another natural phenomenon of abandonment.
The actors lurking in the shadows ahead are Taheen, demonic, half-human creatures with animalistic qualities — but they are currently in our world. They disguise themselves as human beings with rubbery masks, but their true identities are given away by a scar-like red seam running down the sides of their necks.
As he ventures down the hallway, Roland emerges into a room dangling with what appear to be hundreds of scalps — the long clusters of hair drooping down and swaying in the breeze like spider legs.
Really, they’re just wigs the Taheen can choose from when they need to venture beyond the walls of the Dixie Pig. Thinking the Gunslinger is distracted by the strange sight, a fiend leaps from the corner and is promptly dispatched by a swing from the butt of Roland’s revolver. He doesn’t shoot. He’s not trigger-happy. His revolvers fire only when necessary.
“He’s just very efficient in that sense,” Elba says. “You know, if he can clear a room with five bullets as supposed to six, he will.”
From the Hall of Hair, Roland slips into another room as his infiltration of the Dixie Pig continues. This bare, concrete walled torture chamber has a single dentist chair in the middle, rimmed by a corona of blood. Whoever – or whatever – died here, died badly.
A doughy, middle-aged man (who is not really a man) mops up quietly. He has a thick red line running down one side of his neck. Roland is poised to draw, but sends the lowly monster scurrying with a single, unbroken stare instead. Very Eastwood.
This Taheen is not interested in tangling with a Gunslinger. Roland is the last of their kind, a group of warriors who wielded six-guns but were really guided by something else, something unknowable. Think of the spiritual side of a samurai – or the Force-sensitivity of a Jedi, from yet another galaxy altogether.
“There’s a mystical element to him,” Elba says during his break between scenes. “He’s about 200 years old. He’s been around for a long time, and has a deep-rooted connection with the [supernatural] nature of the film. Roland’s completely tuned into that. When you meet him, he’s very much a stoic man, doesn’t want to talk. But when you get to know him, he really knows quite a bit about the world and his world’s history.”
Elba stares up at the shape of Table Mountain, which has reappeared from behind the shifting morning clouds.
“And he very much knows the way The Man in Black works. He’s so clued up on that, which is what frustrates him,” the actor says. “Because he can’t catch him.”
So, uh, am I the only one kinda put off by Roland's getup in these shots?
It's so .... shiny black leather. Like he's an X-Men gliding through the fucking Matrix. Roland should be brown, dusty, weather-beaten and sun-bleached.
Hopefully it works once it's actually a film and not just stills in a stupid magazine.
Something about "blue chambray" seems to stick in my mind; perhaps it's the four million times it gets mentioned in the books.
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That's why I didn't quite like the book, but didn't dislike it either. It's ehhhhh. It didn't just go nowhere, it went backwards. He's worse off pretty much. But I dislike stories in general when things end not Happy Ever After. Reality can be depressing enough. But that's just my take, of course.
An immense shape, like a floating fortress in the mist, looms over the city. At times, it vanishes completely, masked by a curtain of seaside clouds.
When the midday sun breaks through, the gray cliffs and sky-scraping flattop resemble the ruins of impossible ancient architecture. This is Table Mountain, dominating the skyline of Cape Town, South Africa, and in its shadow, another monolith is rising — the film version of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.
The six-guns-and-sorcery saga currently spans eight novels, comic books and short stories, and is woven throughout King’s larger body of bestsellers. It’s a genre mash-up of fantasy, sci-fi, westerns, horror, and mystery, set in a world — or worlds, plural — that are as endless as any built by J.R.R. Tolkien, George Lucas, and J.K. Rowling.
But really, the story comes down to something fairly simple, expressed in the opening line of King’s first book in the series, which will also open the movie: The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
For those new to the tale, it’s largely set in a dimension called Mid-World, where the apocalypse has already come and gone — and now rolls toward our own like a breaking wave. For Constant Readers who are already steeped in King’s lore, director and co-writer Nikolaj Arcel’s movie (which debuts in theaters Feb. 17) will remix the novels much the way superhero movies often draw from decades of comics mythology to create a new cinematic origin story.
The same stones, but a different structure.
BEHOLD, A GUNSLINGER
Standing on the horizon of this otherworldly landscape is Idris Elba’s Roland Deschain — The Gunslinger — a frontier version of a medieval knight who is thirsting for revenge and haunted by visions of a tower that is surrounded by a field of dusky pink roses. He doesn’t fully understand what it means. No one does.
“When we meet Roland he’s a bit lost,” says Elba, sitting in the sun during a break from one of the movie’s dungeon-like sets. “He’s been walking around for a long time, so he definitely feels like a man who’s… coiled.”
In the parlance of King’s books, Roland “has forgotten the face of his father.” “That’s a sense of, ‘You’ve forgotten your purpose,’” Elba says. At the start of the film, Roland is driven by rage, but deep down he is something else. “He’s a protector,” Elba says. He just needs something to reawaken that part of himself.
Off in the distance is his quarry: Matthew McConaughey’s Walter, a.k.a. The Man in Black, a charismatic warlock who decimated Mid-World, is responsible for destroying everyone Roland loved, and is looking for more worlds to end. Bringing down the Tower is one way to end them all at once. (EW will be getting to him in Part II of our Dark Tower coverage today.)
Walter is searching for someone, too – a teenager named Jake Chambers (15-year-old Tom Taylor, in his first film role), who lives in our world and possesses “The Shine,” a powerful psychic ability that King readers should recognize backwards or forwards. Jake’s extraordinary magic could help Walter break the ethereal beams that keep the Tower standing and maintain order in the multiverse.
For Roland, protecting this boy could restore his nobility, putting him back on the path to protecting the Tower itself. “Until he meets Jake, he doesn’t have anything to believe in, really,” Elba says. “He’s really pent up and releases his soul through [defending] the boy.”
THE FACE OF A HERO
One obvious change from the novels is the fact that Roland has always been depicted as a white man with blue eyes, although to Elba that change is no deeper than a layer of skin.
As we sit outside his trailer, watching as the shape of Table Mountain vanishes and reappears in the mist overhead, we talk of Stephen King’s reaction to his casting, which was: “I love it. I think he’s a terrific actor, one of the best working in the business now.”
Elba smiles. Roland doesn’t smile much, but King’s words seem to nudge him.
“I was thrilled. I was thrilled to get this job,” Elba says. “I was thrilled because, you know, it’s an alternative to what you could say, what Roland is described as.”
I ask him if he means a white guy, and Elba shrugs. It’s more than that. “A white guy in a sense, but, also just that you could make a version of this film that appealed to a slightly more action-hero type character and I don’t do those films. I haven’t done many actions films,” he says. “I like to bring a little depth and bring a real character. And what’s been fun is, Nik’s really up for that. So we do takes that are a little bit more commercial, if you like, and we do takes that are f—ing deep, like we’re making an independent film. It’s an iconic character. I want to get it right.”
With Hollywood still struggling with diversity and inclusion, exemplified by the #OscarsSoWhite controversy this year, his casting in the role does seem to be freighted with extra significance. I asked Elba if he considers the race-swapping of the character to be a big deal.
“It’s better just to treat it like no big deal,” Elba answers. “There should be no difference. The character that was written in Stephen’s imagination, it could be any color. It just happens to be me and, you know? In the artwork, it just so happens to be a white guy, but I don’t think that makes any difference. … I think what’s great about it, if I want to say anything about it, is that it is a sign of the times in terms of a colorless society. People go, ‘A good actor is a good actor,’ you know?”
A SCENE OF STEALTH
Roland stands on a rooftop, the wind rustling his floor-length duster. A small camera and sound crew orbits him as he steps through a shattered window into a hallway, seeping with rainwater.
In the movie, this is the roof of the Dixie Pig, a way station in New York City where creatures from the nether can gather, disguise themselves as humans, and head out to prey. In real life, it’s Werdmuller Centre, a decomposing former shopping mall in southeast Cape Town, which has been converted into a hive of horrors for The Dark Tower.
The plaster stalactites crying droplets from the ceiling are real, but it’s hard to know if the graffiti smearing the walls is set-design or just another natural phenomenon of abandonment.
The actors lurking in the shadows ahead are Taheen, demonic, half-human creatures with animalistic qualities — but they are currently in our world. They disguise themselves as human beings with rubbery masks, but their true identities are given away by a scar-like red seam running down the sides of their necks.
As he ventures down the hallway, Roland emerges into a room dangling with what appear to be hundreds of scalps — the long clusters of hair drooping down and swaying in the breeze like spider legs.
Really, they’re just wigs the Taheen can choose from when they need to venture beyond the walls of the Dixie Pig. Thinking the Gunslinger is distracted by the strange sight, a fiend leaps from the corner and is promptly dispatched by a swing from the butt of Roland’s revolver. He doesn’t shoot. He’s not trigger-happy. His revolvers fire only when necessary.
“He’s just very efficient in that sense,” Elba says. “You know, if he can clear a room with five bullets as supposed to six, he will.”
From the Hall of Hair, Roland slips into another room as his infiltration of the Dixie Pig continues. This bare, concrete walled torture chamber has a single dentist chair in the middle, rimmed by a corona of blood. Whoever – or whatever – died here, died badly.
A doughy, middle-aged man (who is not really a man) mops up quietly. He has a thick red line running down one side of his neck. Roland is poised to draw, but sends the lowly monster scurrying with a single, unbroken stare instead. Very Eastwood.
This Taheen is not interested in tangling with a Gunslinger. Roland is the last of their kind, a group of warriors who wielded six-guns but were really guided by something else, something unknowable. Think of the spiritual side of a samurai – or the Force-sensitivity of a Jedi, from yet another galaxy altogether.
“There’s a mystical element to him,” Elba says during his break between scenes. “He’s about 200 years old. He’s been around for a long time, and has a deep-rooted connection with the [supernatural] nature of the film. Roland’s completely tuned into that. When you meet him, he’s very much a stoic man, doesn’t want to talk. But when you get to know him, he really knows quite a bit about the world and his world’s history.”
Elba stares up at the shape of Table Mountain, which has reappeared from behind the shifting morning clouds.
“And he very much knows the way The Man in Black works. He’s so clued up on that, which is what frustrates him,” the actor says. “Because he can’t catch him.”
So, uh, am I the only one kinda put off by Roland's getup in these shots?
It's so .... shiny black leather. Like he's an X-Men gliding through the fucking Matrix. Roland should be brown, dusty, weather-beaten and sun-bleached.
Hopefully it works once it's actually a film and not just stills in a stupid magazine.
EW likes to shine the hell out of their set photos. I don't think I've ever seen anything from them that didn't highlight the artifice of production design. The photos from shooting look a lot better on that front.
Edit: 11/22/63 has one of my favorite 'Look, it's time travel, move past it.' conversations ever.
Beginning spoilers:
"Wait, what happens if I kill my father before I'm born?"
An immense shape, like a floating fortress in the mist, looms over the city. At times, it vanishes completely, masked by a curtain of seaside clouds.
When the midday sun breaks through, the gray cliffs and sky-scraping flattop resemble the ruins of impossible ancient architecture. This is Table Mountain, dominating the skyline of Cape Town, South Africa, and in its shadow, another monolith is rising — the film version of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.
The six-guns-and-sorcery saga currently spans eight novels, comic books and short stories, and is woven throughout King’s larger body of bestsellers. It’s a genre mash-up of fantasy, sci-fi, westerns, horror, and mystery, set in a world — or worlds, plural — that are as endless as any built by J.R.R. Tolkien, George Lucas, and J.K. Rowling.
But really, the story comes down to something fairly simple, expressed in the opening line of King’s first book in the series, which will also open the movie: The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
For those new to the tale, it’s largely set in a dimension called Mid-World, where the apocalypse has already come and gone — and now rolls toward our own like a breaking wave. For Constant Readers who are already steeped in King’s lore, director and co-writer Nikolaj Arcel’s movie (which debuts in theaters Feb. 17) will remix the novels much the way superhero movies often draw from decades of comics mythology to create a new cinematic origin story.
The same stones, but a different structure.
BEHOLD, A GUNSLINGER
Standing on the horizon of this otherworldly landscape is Idris Elba’s Roland Deschain — The Gunslinger — a frontier version of a medieval knight who is thirsting for revenge and haunted by visions of a tower that is surrounded by a field of dusky pink roses. He doesn’t fully understand what it means. No one does.
“When we meet Roland he’s a bit lost,” says Elba, sitting in the sun during a break from one of the movie’s dungeon-like sets. “He’s been walking around for a long time, so he definitely feels like a man who’s… coiled.”
In the parlance of King’s books, Roland “has forgotten the face of his father.” “That’s a sense of, ‘You’ve forgotten your purpose,’” Elba says. At the start of the film, Roland is driven by rage, but deep down he is something else. “He’s a protector,” Elba says. He just needs something to reawaken that part of himself.
Off in the distance is his quarry: Matthew McConaughey’s Walter, a.k.a. The Man in Black, a charismatic warlock who decimated Mid-World, is responsible for destroying everyone Roland loved, and is looking for more worlds to end. Bringing down the Tower is one way to end them all at once. (EW will be getting to him in Part II of our Dark Tower coverage today.)
Walter is searching for someone, too – a teenager named Jake Chambers (15-year-old Tom Taylor, in his first film role), who lives in our world and possesses “The Shine,” a powerful psychic ability that King readers should recognize backwards or forwards. Jake’s extraordinary magic could help Walter break the ethereal beams that keep the Tower standing and maintain order in the multiverse.
For Roland, protecting this boy could restore his nobility, putting him back on the path to protecting the Tower itself. “Until he meets Jake, he doesn’t have anything to believe in, really,” Elba says. “He’s really pent up and releases his soul through [defending] the boy.”
THE FACE OF A HERO
One obvious change from the novels is the fact that Roland has always been depicted as a white man with blue eyes, although to Elba that change is no deeper than a layer of skin.
As we sit outside his trailer, watching as the shape of Table Mountain vanishes and reappears in the mist overhead, we talk of Stephen King’s reaction to his casting, which was: “I love it. I think he’s a terrific actor, one of the best working in the business now.”
Elba smiles. Roland doesn’t smile much, but King’s words seem to nudge him.
“I was thrilled. I was thrilled to get this job,” Elba says. “I was thrilled because, you know, it’s an alternative to what you could say, what Roland is described as.”
I ask him if he means a white guy, and Elba shrugs. It’s more than that. “A white guy in a sense, but, also just that you could make a version of this film that appealed to a slightly more action-hero type character and I don’t do those films. I haven’t done many actions films,” he says. “I like to bring a little depth and bring a real character. And what’s been fun is, Nik’s really up for that. So we do takes that are a little bit more commercial, if you like, and we do takes that are f—ing deep, like we’re making an independent film. It’s an iconic character. I want to get it right.”
With Hollywood still struggling with diversity and inclusion, exemplified by the #OscarsSoWhite controversy this year, his casting in the role does seem to be freighted with extra significance. I asked Elba if he considers the race-swapping of the character to be a big deal.
“It’s better just to treat it like no big deal,” Elba answers. “There should be no difference. The character that was written in Stephen’s imagination, it could be any color. It just happens to be me and, you know? In the artwork, it just so happens to be a white guy, but I don’t think that makes any difference. … I think what’s great about it, if I want to say anything about it, is that it is a sign of the times in terms of a colorless society. People go, ‘A good actor is a good actor,’ you know?”
A SCENE OF STEALTH
Roland stands on a rooftop, the wind rustling his floor-length duster. A small camera and sound crew orbits him as he steps through a shattered window into a hallway, seeping with rainwater.
In the movie, this is the roof of the Dixie Pig, a way station in New York City where creatures from the nether can gather, disguise themselves as humans, and head out to prey. In real life, it’s Werdmuller Centre, a decomposing former shopping mall in southeast Cape Town, which has been converted into a hive of horrors for The Dark Tower.
The plaster stalactites crying droplets from the ceiling are real, but it’s hard to know if the graffiti smearing the walls is set-design or just another natural phenomenon of abandonment.
The actors lurking in the shadows ahead are Taheen, demonic, half-human creatures with animalistic qualities — but they are currently in our world. They disguise themselves as human beings with rubbery masks, but their true identities are given away by a scar-like red seam running down the sides of their necks.
As he ventures down the hallway, Roland emerges into a room dangling with what appear to be hundreds of scalps — the long clusters of hair drooping down and swaying in the breeze like spider legs.
Really, they’re just wigs the Taheen can choose from when they need to venture beyond the walls of the Dixie Pig. Thinking the Gunslinger is distracted by the strange sight, a fiend leaps from the corner and is promptly dispatched by a swing from the butt of Roland’s revolver. He doesn’t shoot. He’s not trigger-happy. His revolvers fire only when necessary.
“He’s just very efficient in that sense,” Elba says. “You know, if he can clear a room with five bullets as supposed to six, he will.”
From the Hall of Hair, Roland slips into another room as his infiltration of the Dixie Pig continues. This bare, concrete walled torture chamber has a single dentist chair in the middle, rimmed by a corona of blood. Whoever – or whatever – died here, died badly.
A doughy, middle-aged man (who is not really a man) mops up quietly. He has a thick red line running down one side of his neck. Roland is poised to draw, but sends the lowly monster scurrying with a single, unbroken stare instead. Very Eastwood.
This Taheen is not interested in tangling with a Gunslinger. Roland is the last of their kind, a group of warriors who wielded six-guns but were really guided by something else, something unknowable. Think of the spiritual side of a samurai – or the Force-sensitivity of a Jedi, from yet another galaxy altogether.
“There’s a mystical element to him,” Elba says during his break between scenes. “He’s about 200 years old. He’s been around for a long time, and has a deep-rooted connection with the [supernatural] nature of the film. Roland’s completely tuned into that. When you meet him, he’s very much a stoic man, doesn’t want to talk. But when you get to know him, he really knows quite a bit about the world and his world’s history.”
Elba stares up at the shape of Table Mountain, which has reappeared from behind the shifting morning clouds.
“And he very much knows the way The Man in Black works. He’s so clued up on that, which is what frustrates him,” the actor says. “Because he can’t catch him.”
So, uh, am I the only one kinda put off by Roland's getup in these shots?
It's so .... shiny black leather. Like he's an X-Men gliding through the fucking Matrix. Roland should be brown, dusty, weather-beaten and sun-bleached.
Hopefully it works once it's actually a film and not just stills in a stupid magazine.
Something about "blue chambray" seems to stick in my mind; perhaps it's the four million times it gets mentioned in the books.
It features something called an NCP scanner. If you activate that and point it at certain stuff, interesting things happen.
Pointing it at the new EW cover is a good start.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
Can we get Matthew McConaughey to be the man in black in the new The Stand as well? Everybody is trying to get their cinematic universes together and that would be a great way to tie them to each other without really having to say anything.
www.thesombragroup.com takes you to a Sombra Group website.
www.sombragroup.com takes you to a page of static with a caption of Icanshowyoufearinahandfulofdust.
Interesting.
(Using the scanner on the first website also does an interesting thing.)
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
Yeah I just found that website. It's playing music too. Sounds like a combo of more than one song?
Big Iron on his hip is part of it.
EDIT HOLY CRAP
I let it play to the line "And the notches on his pistol numbered one and nineteen more
One and nineteen more"
and then all hell breaks loose in the song.
edit: TODAY IS THE NINETEENTH
edit 2: Yeah the app is awesome on that website.
Todash Chimes! A THINNY!
Gotta get me one of those magazines, as it does an interesting thing as well. Gotta figure out what else this works on.
It also works on a picture of the magazine cover, if you don't want to go hoofing it across town.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
The app didn't do anything for me on that website. Do you have to wait for the end with the chimes or something? But show it that train image and dang...
The app didn't do anything for me on that website. Do you have to wait for the end with the chimes or something? But show it that train image and dang...
www.thesombragroup.com has a app image.
The weird static page does stuff if you hold down your mouse click too.
Ever since I was a kid, I hear James Wood's voice when Blaine speaks in the book. I have no idea how that got stuck in my head, but the association is so strong that if he's ever on film and it's anyone else it'll just sound wrong to me
Also can't help but notice Idris Elba has all his fingers in all these shots. If they even do that, maybe save it for a second movie with the other characters?
It would make more sense to wait for the second movie for that, because that's when it becomes thematically relevant.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
As to the app, as best I can tell it just does two things. If you point it at the EW cover, you get a rose. If you point it at certain relevant images, you get a thinny.
I haven't seen anything other than those two outcomes.
Other than that, the app has a login for employees, but if you type something in you just get a message about databases being offline, which makes it sound like something that will be activated later.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
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KadokenGiving Ends to my Friends and it Feels StupendousRegistered Userregular
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
The Sandalwood Guns are the guns of a true gunslinger. They have been passed down through the ages from Arthur Eld himself, down to Steven Deschain and ultimately Roland Deschain.
They were made using the melted down blue-grey steel of the sword, Excalibur, and have the rose, the sign of the Eld, engraved in the side. The sandalwood grips of the gun have never lost their fragrance and near the muzzle of each gun can be seen scroll work which translates to "White", which was Arthur's dinh mark.
However, there are many other legends regarding their origins, and some say the steel and sandalwood are not from Mid-World but brought from an alien world. Other believe the guns came from same Kashamin pyramid that Arthur and his sword Excalibur have been entombed in; others say they were a gift from the Dark Tower.
The guns are extraordinarily large by the standards of modern pistols. They are described multiple times as being "comically large". The guns shoot .45 caliber bullets and our world's equivalent of Roland's original bullets are Long Colt .45's.
Yeah, the guns should be much bigger. I would not describe what Elba is holding as "comically large".
I mean, I'm not sure how you can say that from two pictures that aren't even at the same scale?
From cursory searching on the internet, Colt Army Single Action 45s look to be on average about a foot long, with a barrel of about 5-7".
The barrel of the gun that Elba is holding looks to be about as long, if not a little bit shorter, as Elba's head is tall. Elba is 6'3", human heads are about 10% of body height. So even if we are being generous, the barrel of that gun is at around 7". Which puts it on the large size of Colt Army Single Actions, but still in the realm of normal.
I think even aside from the guns I dislike the duster he is wearing. Roland would never wear anything that interfered with his ability to draw and shoot.
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So, uh, am I the only one kinda put off by Roland's getup in these shots?
It's so .... shiny black leather. Like he's an X-Men gliding through the fucking Matrix. Roland should be brown, dusty, weather-beaten and sun-bleached.
Hopefully it works once it's actually a film and not just stills in a stupid magazine.
11.22.63 is one of my favorite King books, maybe its because he (well his son) nails the ending. I can't think a book in a while that was more of an emotional read for me, and really had me working through a lot of feelings over the loss of my mother when i was younger. At its core the book represented to me the idea of a want or need to change the past due to some great loss, but that its something that you can't do. In the end
11.22.63 spoilers
11.22.63 spoilers
Something about "blue chambray" seems to stick in my mind; perhaps it's the four million times it gets mentioned in the books.
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EW likes to shine the hell out of their set photos. I don't think I've ever seen anything from them that didn't highlight the artifice of production design. The photos from shooting look a lot better on that front.
Edit: 11/22/63 has one of my favorite 'Look, it's time travel, move past it.' conversations ever.
Beginning spoilers:
"Why the fuck would you do that?"
You mean his shirt? Not his jacket?
It features something called an NCP scanner. If you activate that and point it at certain stuff, interesting things happen.
Pointing it at the new EW cover is a good start.
www.thesombragroup.com takes you to a Sombra Group website.
www.sombragroup.com takes you to a page of static with a caption of Icanshowyoufearinahandfulofdust.
Interesting.
(Using the scanner on the first website also does an interesting thing.)
Big Iron on his hip is part of it.
EDIT HOLY CRAP
I let it play to the line "And the notches on his pistol numbered one and nineteen more
One and nineteen more"
and then all hell breaks loose in the song.
edit: TODAY IS THE NINETEENTH
edit 2: Yeah the app is awesome on that website.
Gotta get me one of those magazines, as it does an interesting thing as well. Gotta figure out what else this works on.
It also works on a picture of the magazine cover, if you don't want to go hoofing it across town.
The weird static page does stuff if you hold down your mouse click too.
Trigger guard is gold?
Also can't help but notice Idris Elba has all his fingers in all these shots. If they even do that, maybe save it for a second movie with the other characters?
Anyone figured out the Sombra App yet?
I haven't seen anything other than those two outcomes.
Other than that, the app has a login for employees, but if you type something in you just get a message about databases being offline, which makes it sound like something that will be activated later.
That is an insidious looking train
pleasepaypreacher.net
pleasepaypreacher.net
It's like a foot and a half long.. How big would you need it to be?
pleasepaypreacher.net
http://darktower.wikia.com/wiki/Sandalwood_Guns
Yeah, the guns should be much bigger. I would not describe what Elba is holding as "comically large".
This is a Colt army .45 that shoots .45 long
idris's guns are much bigger
I mean, I'm not sure how you can say that from two pictures that aren't even at the same scale?
From cursory searching on the internet, Colt Army Single Action 45s look to be on average about a foot long, with a barrel of about 5-7".
The barrel of the gun that Elba is holding looks to be about as long, if not a little bit shorter, as Elba's head is tall. Elba is 6'3", human heads are about 10% of body height. So even if we are being generous, the barrel of that gun is at around 7". Which puts it on the large size of Colt Army Single Actions, but still in the realm of normal.
On the high side of normal != Comically Large
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