THE DARK TOWER

'''THE DARK TOWER. Nikolai Arcel, director, co-script''' with Jeff Pinkner (Pinkner also executive producer), Anders Thomas Jensen, and Akiva Goldsman, from the novels by Stephen King. Akiva Goldsman, producer, with Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, and Stephen King. USA: Sony Pictures Entertainment, Weed Road Pictures et al. (production) / Columbia Pictures (US theatrical distribution), 2017. See IMDb for South Africa as main location and details on production and distribution. Christopher Glass, Oliver Scholl, production design.

Live-action generic mashup classified on IMDb as Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Western, significant here for shots combining images of psi powers (labeled as "Shine/Shining" — it's a Stephen King story) — and Industrial cybernetic equipment. Note children being held down in metal chairs and having their brains tapped for psi power in ways that hurt them: a standard horror image, reinforced in scariness and relevance by its location in a high-tech sorcerer's tower: not the Dark Tower of the title but a truncated one in a style a colleague of Erlich's called in another context "Stalinist Moderne," also sometime called as a joke "literal Brutalist."

Note also the SF/Fantasy/Horror image of portals, here both magical and technological, taking one from world to world.

As an aside — the Gunslinger hero's name of Roland Deschain, reinforcing the allusion to Robert Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (1855), a brief speech in William Shakespeare's King Lear, and the fairy tale "Childe Roland."

Political Alert: Insofar as one takes the politics of the film seriously, it's definitely pro-gun.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 4Aug17