The City of Lost Children (1995)
Both The Dark Tower and The City of Lost Children begin with an abducted child in a dystopian place being strapped to a machine that’s supposed to help the villain achieve some goal. In The Dark Tower, the plan is to use children’s shine to blast the titular structure and destroy it. In The City of Lost Children, children are being mined for their dreams. Maybe they’re more similar than they seem, since in The Dark Tower part of Jake’s shining power involves his dreams, which show him images of the other dimensions. In The City of Lost Children, dreams mostly involve Santa Claus.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s visionary, Gilliam-esque sci-fi fantasy film also teams up a larger than life hero (Ron Perlman) with a kid (Judith Vittet), as the latter helps the former find his kidnapped brother. Like most adventure stories, the basic plot of both this and The Dark Tower is that a hero travels to the location of a villain, mostly for personal reasons but eventually also to stop an ongoing or planned evil scheme. It’s what happens along the way and what viewers are treated to visually in their journey that matters, and The Dark Tower fails to thrill or provide spectacle and wonder on even a tenth of the level that The City of Lost Children does. Jeunet and Caro’s story isn’t always perfect, but they more than make up for it with imaginative scenarios, settings, and characters.
After the Wizard (2012)
One of the main influences on King’s “Dark Tower” series is L. Frank Baum’s “Oz” books, and likely also the iconic film version of The Wizard of Oz from 1939. Again, I didn’t want to go for the obvious and so initially thought to recommend the underrated Return to Oz, which like The Dark Tower is not well-liked by moviegoers who were already fans of their respective characters. But Return to Oz is still directly adapted from Baum’s writings.
The Dark Tower is a kind of sequel to King’s books, continuing from them and presumably best appreciated by those viewers familiar with what came previously. After the Wizard is to the “Oz” books as The Dark Tower is to the “Dark Tower” books, and that analogy includes the fact that After the Wizard hasn’t fared any better with audiences. And it’s not just any old continuation, such as another trip by Dorothy to the Land of Oz. This time, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man come to Kansas, just as the Gunslinger of “The Dark Tower” comes to “Keystone Earth” in his movie (all of them also visit NYC). The big difference would be that After the Wizard is a very small-budget indie film with lesser quality performances and a much more earnest family friendly tone. It’s a neat idea, something I could see done better with more money and the talent that could afford. For now it’s an interesting watch, and free to stream if you have Amazon Prime.
Logan (2017) and Wonder Woman (2017)
For my last two picks I’m going very recent. These two superhero movies from this year are among the most financially successful and most acclaimed films of the year so far, and for mostly good measure, though primarily in the context of their genre and of blockbusters fulfilling a long-desired release among their respective fanbases. The Dark Tower should have been and could have been just as phenomenal, especially given that like Logan and Wolverine and most comic book movies it wasn’t going to be so much an adaptation of a specific story as based on certain characters and the kinds of stories they tend to inhabit. It had so much room for great original ideas.
Logan is also, of course, another fantasy film inspired by Westerns, with Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) a grizzled old cowboy akin to Clint Eastwood’s later years genre entries, such as Unforgiven. In this solo spin-off, his third, the X-Man reluctantly takes on a child companion (Dafne Keen). And like Jake in The Dark Tower, she’s been obsessed with the hero she seeks, having seen him first in drawings. The girl pulls Wolverine into her world, but not inter-dimensionally. And their goal isn’t to find an evil figure threatening the universe. Instead he’s guiding her to a supposed sanctuary, while villains are on their trail because they want to exploit the kid’s powers — which also parallels The Dark Tower.
Wonder Woman features no child protagonist or companion. But it does involve a character (Chris Pine) finding himself in a strange world, where he meets an extraordinary hero (Gal Gadot), and he brings that hero back to his own world for some fish-out-of-water awkwardness and humor. The reason that hero, Princess Diana, needs to come out to the real world is similar to why the Gunslinger comes to Earth: a supreme evil being is also here and trying to cause mass destruction to the world. In The Dark Tower, that threat extends to the whole multiverse. Both Ares, the God of War, and the Man in Black actually have a talent for making humans destroy themselves, though the latter does so in a more magical manner.
Related Topics: Logan, Movie DNA, The Dark Tower, Wonder Woman
