It is that time of the year when some dear and long-time friends of mine stay at my house.  They are traveling musicians, and you can check them out at www.suzanneandjim.com.  Some of their material is also on YouTube.  If you like old timey tunes, I highly recommend them.  As I am sitting down to watch The Dark Tower (2017), Suzanne walks in and comments on how much she likes Idris Elba, who plays the gunslinger Roland Deschain, in the film.  As I was in the middle of a plot that I barely understood, I mentioned that it is based on a book by Stephen King.  She immediately averred that she does not like movies that use his material because they are scary.  Normally, I agree with this assessment, but the word I used to briefly describe the film to her is unfathomable.  It is not just the pointless plot, but also an odd combination of a teenage adventure, Western, and a work of fantasy.  A story can have any element a writer can conceive of in it.  However, if it is also difficult to follow, the constituent parts become that much harder to understand.  Luckily, there is some solid material for this Catholic reviewer to discuss.

The opening crawl gives some clue about what is The Dark Tower.  It is a structure at the center of the universe the holds back evil from consuming everything.  This situation will not do for Walter Padick (Matthew McConaughey), a sorcerer that seeks to destroy this bastion of good.  His weapons for doing so are the minds of children, harnessing them somehow in order to lob their psychic energy across time and space at the eponymous spire.  Every time this happens, there is an earthquake on Earth, felt in New York City where lives Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor), a middle school boy who has visions of everything just described.  When he dreams about them, he makes drawings that disturb his mother, Laurie (Katheryn Winnick).  If you happen to see this movie, you would probably not blame her.  She chalks them up as continued trauma over losing his father, though his step-father Lon (Nicholas Pauling) just thinks the kid is crazy.  These theories are given credence when Jake gets in a fight at school over one of his classmates trying to steal his sketchbook, and Jake is sent home.  Feeling like they are out of options, Laurie and Lon contact an institute for troubled children.  The people who arrive to take Jake away, though, are clearly in the employ of Walter, who has been snatching children from Earth for years.  Jake manages to escape and heads to Brooklyn where a house he had seen in another dream is located.  Once inside, he locates what turns out to be a gateway to another dimension, and he puts in a series of numbers that have been in his mind along with the Dark Tower.  The place he is taken to is a barren desert, and he walks for an entire day through a wasteland before he sees a light in the distance.  It is the campfire of Roland.  Jake has already had a vision of this last gunslinger confronting Walter, and is thus familiar with the man even if it is not mutual for Roland.  In the confrontation witnessed in Jake’s mind, Walter had killed Roland’s father, Steven Deschain (Dennis Haysbert), so Roland only cares about revenge.  Roland is initially dismissive of Jake until the boy talks of seeing what he refers to as the “Dark Man,” which is obviously Walter.  Sensing an opportunity to get more information on his target, Roland takes Jake to a nearby village with seers that can help the kid with his visions.  With some confrontations along the way, which result in Walter being hurt, they get to their destination.  There, Jake converses with Arra (Claudia Kim), a seer who tells Jake that his “shine” or psychic powers are unlike anything she has encountered.  They also help to give Roland the location of Walter’s base, but it is a six month’s journey.  Seeking to get there faster, Roland asks that the villagers open their portal even though they know it will bring the unwanted attention of Walter’s goons.  To get to the right place, Jake and Roland must first travel to Earth.  Once there, Jake brings Roland to a hospital where they are somehow able to treat the wound of a demon that has been slowing the gunslinger.  Once Roland is, incredibly, feeling better, Jake decides that they need to go back to his house in order to research his other drawings for a clue to the next gate.  When they get there, they find that Walter has already visited, leaving a dead Lon and a char spot on the floor where presumably Laurie had been burned alive.  Roland tries to comfort the teenager.  Yet it is still evident that Roland remains focused on revenge, prompting Jake to tell the gunslinger to go on his own.  For Jake, the important thing, despite his emotional pain, is protecting the Dark Tower.  In other words, Jake’s intentions are pure, and it reminds Roland of his duties as a gunslinger.  Unfortunately, Roland is unable to prevent Walter from snatching Jake, taking the powerful young seer to his base to finally obliterate the obstruction to the reign of evil.  It is at this point that the movie turns into action schlock, with Roland taking on a small army of Walter’s minions as he tries to make it into the portal through which Jake and Walter traveled.  To try to prevent any more progress, Walter comes out to confront Roland.  With some psychic help from Jake, Roland uses a trick shot to kill Walter, and rescues Jake.  Over a victory hotdog, Roland offers to bring Jake with him and train the young man as a gunslinger, and that is where this comes to an end.

The climactic action sequence in The Dark Tower gets pretty silly, which is in keeping with the rest of the film.  I was also unclear how much of this worked.  For example, why could not the psychic energies of regular adults be used to destroy the title structure?  I guess this has something to do with what it says in the opening crawl about how it can be brought down by the mind of a child, but that is the only clue on this score.  What is a little clearer is Walter’s goal.  They do not spend much time on his motivations, though.  He is simply a bad guy that wants bad things to happen.  Among the bad things he says to people is that there is nothing after one dies, which he speaks to them just before sending them into oblivion.  More pointedly, he claims that “death always wins.”  It is that concept that grabbed my Catholic attention.  I do not claim to be an expert on Stephen King’s work, but there are Christian themes in many of them.  It has been argued that this can be attributed to him being married to a Catholic woman, but that is speculation for another time.  Much of what he writes about speaks to a broad struggle between good and evil.  The most prominent of his books about this fight is The Stand, originally published in 1978.  The Dark Tower is based on a series of books of the same name, though the powers-that-be behind the camera decided to condense it into one film.  In any case, the idea that “death always win” is a lie told by the enemy designed to separate us from God.  If there is nothing beyond this life, what point is there in doing good?  It is a struggle the Church has been engaging in for centuries, but modern culture and society seem to align with Walter’s views on the matter.  However, you do not need a gun to do your part in the fight.  What is required is a heart open to God and prayer.

My prayer for you is that you avoid the nonsense that is The Dark Tower.  There is nothing too objectionable about it other than the over-the-top action.  I have no idea if this is in keeping with the source material though I hope it also has a happy ending.  Still, you can get better messages from other cinematic places.