So, this is a sequel, right? That's what I heard

So, this is a sequel, right? That's what I heard.

Why is Roland black and in modern america now?

yeah

Well, is there an answer?

I'm actually hyped for this even though they made Roland black. I like Idris Elba and he can pull off the role, besides the skin color

i don't know why he's black in this

because the end of the books is a reset and start at the beginning Yea its stupid as fuck

I know it's reset, but that doesn't explain why he's now black and in modern new york.

Roland is damned for the choices he's made. It makes sense.

I'll probably get lynched for this, but just read the director's reddit AMA. He seems to be a huge fan and understand the books. It's a great comfort.

Roland in the books has been doing the same shit over and over again for a while at that point, except every journey is slightly different. Sometimes Cuthbert lives, sometimes he doesn't meet Susan, sometimes, he doesn't have to deal with King, the autistic hack, writing himself into the story. This time it looks like he gets to keep the Horn of Eld and for some reason (((they))) thought 'well, things change - let's also make him a nigger'.

he has to do everything all over again, no memories of the past. That means getting jake and the gang back together. So he goes true the doors presumably and is back in new york.
I stooped reading at the middle of nothing happening flashback book.

Except this time he has the horn of eld

>Why is Roland black

It's called the DARK tower for a reason. The 'urban' audience wouldn't have understood a white actor in that role.

DIVERSITY, YOU BIGOT!

>the DARK tower
This is a bbc reference isn't it?

>Roland is damned for the choices he's made. It makes sense.
Maybe if this was set in the old west, but it's modern. Him being black doesn't really change things for him.

I dunno, I'm just sad we won't get another Man With No Name. I like the actor, but I really wanted to see a Clint-look alike on the big screen.

Plus, if this gives the source material a boost, that means he'll be a nigger from now on due to synergy. So, yeah, BLACK'd.

You stopped reading at one of the best books?

Roland is damned from the start. Walter tells him as much

>write series wherein you acknowledge up front that an infinite universe exists
>ka is a wheel
>getting to the end of the tower just sends you back to the beginning
>there exists a reality where roland is a black man

It's a leap, but it's not that big of a leap.

Mostly I'm sort of hype for over the top gunslinger tricks now that ol' dead eyes will have all his fingers for a while.

Wizard and Glass was imo the best book in the entire series.

Trailer makes it look like some confusing blade vampire hunter shit, this movie will bomb so hard.

I have zero confidence that Idris Elba can play Roland. He's the guy that hams everything up and Roland is supposed to be the super-stoic Man With No Name.

Id ont know the fist half was to boring for me and at the intermission i doped it.

Bump

The trailer is marketing for a movie trying to adapt horror-sci-fi-fantasy-westerns. Making it into one coherent thing. There's a reason the this has always been a daunting task

I am, too. Mat McMacrame is a good choice for Flagg, too.

Everybody complaining about him being black is stupid.
In the books a gender fluid semen demon stole his jizz and put it in a black woman.
It's not too much of a stretch to say that Roland was reincarnated in the baby and sent back to the beginning.

the problem is that the books put A LOT of emphasis on Roland's looks, who is basically clint eastwood out of a western film

him suddenly being a nigga is kinda hard to swallow to most people who read the goddamn story

I can live with Elba Roland, and tons of changes to the books. Let's face it, it needs tons of changes.

But if Roland doesn't throw Jake off a god damned cliff then fuck this movie.

>Roland is damned for the choices he's made. It makes sense.

>make literally the only choices that could even possibly lead to a good outcome
>be damned
Gan's a dick.

>if Roland doesn't throw Jake off a god damned cliff then fuck this movie.
they can't remove that
THEY SIMPLY CAN'T
its one of the main fucking plots in the DT story

Yeah, any fan of the books was expecting an Eastwood look alike to be cast as Roland. Seeing such a radically different imagining of Roland is hard to accept.

i never read the books

is the dark tower a metaphor for Idris Elba? is he the dark tower?

So I haven't read the books yet so I probably spoiled myself by reading this thread, but let me get this straight. There's some sort of crazy time loop plot that enables this movie to be a sequel that retells the story without being 100% faithful to it? Because that's a pretty clever way to do an adaptation if so.

Personally I thought the trailer looked awesome either way.

The pacing was off and the romance was bad but yeah it was pretty good. Best book is and always will be the Gunslinger though.

I guess no one will ever dispute that the worst book is Song of Susannah?

in the end the story to me was about redemption
Roland is fucking obsessed with reaching the Tower and made lots of bad choices, sacrifices and fucked people over during his quest to get it
His group of companions, Jake, Eddie and Susannah make him slowly realize there are other things besides the tower, but all of them either die or leave Roland so he can continue his quest
He only realizes this by the time he makes it to the summit of the tower

>Roland is Mordred
then who was spider

the end of the last book reveals that the whole story has been repeating tons of times
everytime Roland reaches the top of the tower, the thing starts again, although with some slight differences
It was said since they announced the movie that it was basically one of those restarts

I'm hoping the whole big brother fantasy thing the trailer was pushing is just to set up the fall even more but I'm worried.

I think the theme of the series changes at least twice because Stephen King took forever to write it. It could very easily be argued that Roland's actions were entirely morally justified, especially given the plot establishes that he's the only kind of person that could ever make it that far. But then King almost dies and gets born again and feels really uncomfortable with how he wrote Roland.

To me, the story is about a human enduring in the face of infinity.

Artificial movie.

The Dark Tower is the physical embodiment of the hub of the multiverse. Creation is not just infinite, but made up of an infinity of infinities. The Dark Tower is falling. Roland starts out trying to see it simply for its own sake, but eventually endeavors to try to save it. He keeps saving it, forever. He's damned to do it over and over the course of infinity. The story is always different but always the same.

The closer it gets the more worried I get. When's the review embargo up?

What exactly is a natural movie? Organic free range wild fed?

Younger Viggo would have been the perfect Roland imo

This is just a random movie where "stuff" happens, then they plaster a few Dark Tower references in so that Stephen King autists go and watch it.

That's pretty interesting. So what about the thing the OP mentioned? Is the modern America thing a new twist? I was pretty surprised when I saw that because from what little I knew I didn't think it was a series that had "the real world" in it but like I said, I don't really know much.

Agreed. Steel eyed and weather beaten but still strong.

No real Dark Tower fan wants to see a faithful adaptation. The later books are a complete clusterfuck that totally squander the promise of the premise.

>man with no name
>has a name

in the second book, Roland goes to modern america through a magic door
modern being the late 80s or so, guess they just decided to adapt the time period to the current one

>I didn't think it was a series that had "the real world" in it
There isn't a real world in that sense (until a later book retcons it). But yes, an infinite variety of universes that feature a some kind of modern US exist in this setting; although they can be very strange despite that. Lud is borderline unrecognizable as a version of New York, but it's heavily implied that it is one nonetheless. And of course an infinity of far stranger ones also exist.

In the books, Roland is from Gilead, which is a fantasy land. But the kid, Jake, is from 1970's America in a world for the most part identical to ours.

>Death's horse
>is named Binky

Don't get me wrong is was a fan of the first 3 books, fourth was ok, just not very Dark Towery. Final 3 can fuck themselves.

The fact that this film in no way looks like it includes much from the books, aside from a few names and references, means it is an artificial movie.

Jake was always from a different decade than Eddie. At least, that version of Jake was.

Jake came from 1977
Eddie from 1987

This series sounds more and more ridiculous the more I hear about it. But in a good way. Thanks for the answers.

I suggest you to read the first 3 books
they are fairly short and will give you a good glimpse of the story, if you like them try to tackle the rest

The basic premise seems to be entirely the same. It doesn't seem to follow the plot of book 1, but that's understandable given that would be a terrible film if closely adapted despite being a great book. The less it takes from the last half of the series the better.

It's written over the entirety of Stephen King's career so it's very uneven, not just in quality but in tone and theme. When it's good it's REALLY damn good, but when it's bad...ugh. Most fans will agree that the first few books are significantly better than the last ones. Just a warning before you get too invested. The Gunslinger (book 1) in particular is very different from most of the rest of the series.

>Why is Roland black
The writers got as far as "The man in black fled across the desert" and stopped reading the book.
Of course, they later forgot the actual line, until one of them pointed out it was "The black man fled across the desert" and they all nodded in agreement because that sounded right.

Walter O'Dimm dindu nuffin, he a good boy tryin a turn he life aroun'

>hands up don't shoot

>“Death, but not for you, gunslinger.”
holy shit, how true this was

Sometimes I think the first book and the coda to the last book were the only parts that were worth it.

>The writers got as far as "The man in black fled across the desert" and stopped reading the book.

Actually the first person to play Roland was Viggo Mortensen (that would have been godly), then it became Javier Bardem (probably because Viggo told the truth about Israel which had him blacklisted), then it became Idris Elba...

if they make more movies, how do you think the will fuck up the whole Blaine train segment?

They can't fuck up the ending more than King did.

so theres no end to this story? whats the fucking point then

These books were great. Until I finished the one where star wars and Harry Potter (seriously) characters and items randomly appeared.

I literally looked up from the book and said "what the fuck."

I choose to believe the last 3 were never written. What a hot load of shit. And the ending, while I never expect much from King, is such a steaming hot pile of rancid shit, that I have yet to read a series with an ending as bad and well, shitty.

He saves the tower. The tower is infinite, it has to be saved infinitely. Roland is keeping all creation going through his own personal suffering. I think I've heard that story before and it's not generally considered pointless.

You pleb

What the hell are you talking about? I'm still really depressed that King died before he could resolve the Blaine cliffhanger.

The gimmicky ending is the only good thing about the books.

Child Rowland to the dark tower came,
His word was still 'Fie, foh, and fum
I smell the blood of a British man.
— King Lear, Act 3, scene 4

the first book is lit kino

the Tull massacre of the first book is great

Because DIEVERSIIIIIIIIITY

It's vogue to cast anything that isn't white men in films, but Hollywood has no creativity so they keep rebooting old shit and diversifying it

The whole talk between Roland and Walter is great too.

>Size, Gunslinger, size

THEN WHO WAS MY CHAP

MY DEAR LITTLE CHAP

fuck Mia was annoying

That whole thing could have been interesting if it was written by someone that wasn't Stephen King.

>not reading wizard and glass
Literally the best book in the series, if not the only one worthwhile

>tfw no Delgado gilly girl

I feel like it's the most polarizing book in the series. People will either love it or drop the series because of it.

I dropped it. It's a long fucking flashback where you know nothing really matters because it's all in the past, Roland obviously survived it, his love interest obviously died, and his friends either died there or died later, who cares? It's a needless backstory because Roland's already internalized all of it and whatever effect it's had on him has already manifested in his words and actions in the present timeline. Plus, for a lot of people, the surreal fantasy nightmare wasteland landscape was a huge drawing factor, but we ditch it for a very straight-laced western one.

It wasn't all 'straight laced' though.
Don't you remember the evil flesh-eating canyon they drive the evil cowboys into?
The witch was pretty cool, too.

Complete agree with your reasoning though, this is why I have come to despise prequels. Imagine a world with no Better Call Saul, no Episodes 1-3.
It would be a better world.

Don't remember the flesh-eating canyon because I didn't get that far.

The witch was just in the very beginning as far as I got, too. The stuff I read was a very awkward romance, King describing Roland's love for other men the only way he can, and them gallivanting about a western town looking at some shady machinery. I remember one run in with evil cowboys as far as I got.

the build up of the 4th books was pretty slow and the romance parts were awkward as hell

still, the payoff is pretty good with how clever Roland fucks up the evil guys

oh, there was also the massive mexican stand off with like 6 or 7 guys involved

>Why is Roland black and in modern america now?
So millennials will watch it

I think I remember the Mexican stand off. Where one of Roland's friends is using a slingshot as his weapon, right? That's the initial run in with the evil cowboys in the saloon or whatever, right?

yeah, cutberth is aiming some dude with a slingshot, Alain has his knife on the back of other dude and Roland finally arrives put his gun on the back of the skull of the other guy

I think Viggos days of being in a white supremacist film are over, don't you?

Have you asshats even watched the trailer? It's clearly only loosely based on the book.

Yeah as King got older and became a bigger liberal faggot, the quality of the story gets worse. This is true of all of work. The Stand and The Gunslinger are easily his best books. Stuff like The Cell is garbage.

under the dome was also complete smoking diarrhea

>Younger Viggo would have been the perfect Roland imo

Viggo was the first choice to play Roland, then he spoke out against Israel and the jews in Hollywood blacklisted him.

It's cute you think that has anything to do with what you're replying to.

The Man in Black is not the Crimson King, so what's up with that?

There was both a succubus and an incubus. They were two distinctly different entities.

What's your point?

The succubus became the incubus. It's part of their life cycle.

>Why is Roland black
Stephen King is an SJW
>and in modern america now
Stephen King is a hack, likely stole all his good work and blamed the discrepancy between writing styles on drugs.

I don't understand why people complain about Roland being black. His ancestor is King Arthur, right? So King Arthur's great grandson or whatever had sex with a black lady. Done. That's all the explanation you need, and you don't even need that.

Different characters? As I can see here it seems Mattew is both.

The fuck even happened in song of Susannah? I read them all just two years ago. Is that the one where nothing happens and they visit a corporate office in New york, or the one where he rips off magnificent seven plus Harry Potter?

SoS is the former. Wolves of Calla is the latter.