If you were quick enough on the draw this morning, you got a sneak-peek at a clearly unfinished trailer for the first major-film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. The leak, courtesy of an upload to a Japanese-language Vimeo account, confirmed a few things, including a February 2017 release, how actor Idris Elba will look as the series’ Roland Deschain, and how this film apparently diverges from the series’ literary genesis.
“What happens in one world echoes in others,” actor/narrator Idris Elba says as the trailer flashes post-apocalyptic footage that a young boy sees in his sleep. “These aren’t dreams,” the boy tells a psychologist. “There’s another world out there.” Indeed, this trailer contains approximately 50 percent footage from an Earth-like world, in which teenage hero Jake Chambers sees things that other humans cannot, including a catastrophic event that could kill millions of people.
The trailer follows Chambers (played by Tom Taylor) as he pieces together clues from his visions to find a portal to Deschain’s world—and then convinces the series’ gunslinger to come to Earth and save it. Deschain can be seen walking through fantastical places, jumping through windows, and aiming a pair of six-shooters at one giant, green monster in a forest.
“Did you tell the kid that everyone who walks with you dies?” asks the film’s Man in Black, played by Matthew McConaughey. Whether he has that conversation with Deschain is unclear. What’s clear, at the very least, is that this film significantly plays with the books’ Jake Chambers timeline, which saw the boy appear in the first book in much different circumstances. (The trailer’s reveal of Chambers’ life in New York City better resembles the circumstances in book three, The Waste Lands.) Based on this footage, the film also appears to dump major book characters Eddie and Susannah.
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