Ending of the Dark Tower Series

[Frost Giant]

Don't get me wrong here, I do like the DT series very much.
I thought the Horn of Eld was a bit of a cop out. The Battle with the Crimson King comes down to erasing a doodle?
But in my opinion, the series started to go wrong when King got obsessed with having the characters sound like pirates. YAR!! Having Gasher's folks talking like that in Lud is one thing. Revising the series to have almost everyone sounding that way is a little silly. I had lent out my copy of the first Gunslinger book to someone and never gotten it back. I picked up another one, only to find it heavily revised to my dismay. I finally found the real first addition original in a used book store and bought it on the spot.
The last books are very solid, there are many great elements to them. The 2 things that bothered me most were:
1) The non-ending ending. I consider the alternate universe park scene the true ending. They should have ended it with the slamming door of the tower, like how The Ninth Gate ended.
2) I'm very sorry King was hit by a van. Really I am. But does that necessitate writing himself into the story? What an awkward, lame plot device. It's shoe-horned in so tightly all it does is shatter suspension of disbelief. He should stick to making cameos in the film adaptations. I could see him playing Brown at the beginning of the first book, for example.
All that aside the series overall was great. The parts that are the homage to Robert Browning's poem run through those books like veins of a precious metal. There are great tie ins with The Stand and Salem's Lot that make the story more enjoyable too. I collect the Marvel editions and admire the artwork they created for the story.
Above all I look forward to a big or small screen adaptation done by a director that can carve a great screenplay out of that block of wood series. I believe that a fantastic mini-series could be sculpted out of those books.

 

[Frost Giant]

Those of us who were unhappy with the appendix ending to the Dark Tower might be even more leery about the direction the movie is taking. See this morning's article in cinemablend:

The Dark Tower Finds Its Female Lead, But Who Is This Character?

While I like Idris and Matthew being cast, Sony having the reins makes me nervous. The details in the linked article are not encouraging. I barely remember the female character they're talking about, when I saw the headline I assumed they had cast Susan Delgado - which would have been an important development worthy of being in the news.
They seem to want to give it the Spiderman treatment where studio execs re-write the story in hopes of creating a franchise. I've always hated the word franchise when it is applied to a creative endeavor like adapting a literary work to the big screen. McDonalds is a franchise, after all, so I just don't see that industrial business notion having a positive influence on the final artistic result. It keeps the focus on what sells rather than what the story is about. Sony seems to be perpetually deluded into the notion that good entertainment or meaningful storytelling can be reduced to a marketing formula.

 

[Judderman]

Well being a franchise isn't so bad as there are 7 books which could very easily make 7 films.
Idris is a great actor and Matthew aint too bad either. Clearly it will have big budget treatment.

But as for this Tirana. Is there even a character with that name? A model will obviously attract some attention to the show. Could she be a character who Roland meets at some point in his desert journey? Like in Tull? Or someone he left in his home town?

 

[Frost Giant]

Judderman - "Well being a franchise isn't so bad"

As long as they don't get so distracted with selling t-shirts, lunch boxes and supermodels that they lose sight of the actual story. The question of "what sells?" shouldn't override the original stories that were written, in my opinion. Great casting, lots of money, no argument there. I think Idris and Matthew will do great with their roles as long as there isn't a group of Sony executives off to the side dictating their every move. I just don't want to see Roland sitting next to Spiderman in Franchise Hell.

 

[thatollie]

Well being a franchise isn't so bad as there are 7 books which could very easily make 7 films.
Idris is a great actor and Matthew aint too bad either. Clearly it will have big budget treatment.

But as for this Tirana. Is there even a character with that name? A model will obviously attract some attention to the show. Could she be a character who Roland meets at some point in his desert journey? Like in Tull? Or someone he left in his home town?

She is indeed in the book series. She's a rando from the last book.

 

[KipIngram]

Think about this. What other ending would have been better? I came to the ending thinking that The Dark Tower was a seriously good yarn, but after the ending I escalated it to "epic." It was THE BEST ENDING KING COULD HAVE WRITTEN, bar none. It added whole layers of profundity to the whole thing.

 

[Boneman]

But the ending is a new beginning, what more could we ask for...?