"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." Thus began Stephen King's "The Gunslinger," the comparatively slim 1982 novel which kicked off the mammoth, 4,250-page, eight-book fantasy series "The Dark Tower." In a collective literary opus which took the author three decades to complete, his imagination knew no bounds as he crafted one of the finest, most immersive examples of world-building ever put to page. Long thought unfilmable, the source material has been transferred to screen via a massive retooling that somehow combines all the books and virtually none of them at all. Standing confidently on its own yet crying out for a deeper dive, "The Dark Tower" is alternately savvy and frustrating—savvy because it somehow cohesively and engrossingly tells its complex story while avoiding lumbering exposition, and frustrating because there is so much untapped potential that will only see the light of day if this genre-bending $60-million adventure is a financial success.
See Dustin Putman, TheFilmFile.com. for full review
