To celebrate the 42nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, I’m breaking my own rule and publishing something that isn’t about science fiction. It turned out, fortunately, to be science fiction, but when it was written its factuality was unknown. I’m referring to the beautiful, chilling speech written for President Nixon in the event the astronauts became stranded on the Moon. To be delivered to the nation while the astronauts were still alive and awaiting death by suffocation, they would have listened to a long range transmission of the President delivering this, their eulogy, from another planet, while their lives and final hours were helplessly mourned from a quarter of a million miles away.
To put this into perspective, you need to understand that it was considered so likely that the astronauts wouldn’t return that a euphemism for how it would be handled was created. Having exhausted all options and determined that lift off was impossible, the stranded astronauts would “close down communications” with Mission Control in Houston and be left in silence, either to die slowly or, if they chose, to commit suicide. At no place is the inevitability of their deaths so hauntingly real as when the document details the President’s instructions for contacting the “widows-to-be.” Yet, despite the gravest of peril and the nearly infinite unknowns they faced, in the name of science and exploration, on behalf of all mankind these men lined up for the chance to risk being stranded on a cold, dead world beyond all hope of rescue. Just to see what we as a species could learn and achieve.
This is science. This is exploration. This is our shared American history. This is everything we, as human beings, can look to within ourselves when we need to know, to feel, to truly understand the definitions of ‘pride’ and ‘ dedication’ and ‘accomplishment.’ This article is a meager tribute; I’m not sure it’s possible for my small words, tucked away here in our little corner of the internet, to convey the thanks and admiration I feel for the brave men and women who have toiled, struggled, suffered and died to turn the science fiction I read into the science fact that every human being, in every corner of this Earth, now lives and shares. They have literally changed the way every human being will understand and live on this planet, forever. It’s humbling. All I can do is to extend, on behalf of myself and the rest of The Sci-Fi Guys, my deepest, most sincere gratitude for all their efforts and sacrifices. Thank you, all of you, for everything.
This makes me sound really shitty, but I’m kind of glad The Dark Tower didn’t work out. It was an overhyped, overinflated project to begin with, and to be perfectly honest they have been trying to sell the audience on it for so long that I was more or less sick of it before I ever saw it. The Dark Tower series is not Stephen King’s best work, and not everything a popular artists writes needs to be made into a movie. I’ve got a really simple way for studios to cut costs. Stop making franchises out of every fucking thing in the world, and start making movies like they used to – one at a god damn time. If the first Dark Tower movie was any good, then make a second. If sales from the second warranted a third, then move ahead with one. Don’t commit to multiple fucking films and a TV series just because Stephen King’s name is attached. That’s moronic. Look at the quality and successes of his movies and TV shows – not exactly stellar. Not a track record worth banking hundreds of millions of dollars on. A few big hits and a WHOLE LOT of misses. Really, really bad misses. The guy can write a great fucking book, there’s no doubt about that, but translating those books onto film has always been a crapshoot at best. How about doing just one movie first, just to see if it works. If it does, THEN concentrate on sequels. If not, then you haven’t made a mess of things like they have with The Dark Tower now. It’s pretty simple, really. That’s why they’ve done it like that for the last 80 fucking years. Because it works.
Oh, and Ron Howard is doing a fucking racing movie? Are you fucking kidding me? The mighty have not just fallen, they’ve nosedived deep into the heart of Shit Lake. A fucking racing movie. Jesus Christ.
If you were talking about any (most) other series, I’d agree. Studio’s are too intent on tentpole franchises rather than standalone great films.
And I realize how much this can sound like me just defending a storyline I love. Let me say that when I found out that they were shopping around the idea for a movie, I’d thought, “I’d like to see it, but they’re going to fuck it up.” When I heard that they were doing three movies and two series, I thought: “God damn, those fucking geniuses, they’ve GOT IT! Finally, someone knows how to handle the (any) epic storyline.
So what would the first movie in the Dark Tower series be about. A old grizzled guy rides into a town, shacks up with a bartender, rapes a preacher’s wife and kills everyone including the wench at the bar, then rides out of the town, meets a kid, fucks a demon, drops the kid into a chasm to finally catch the guy he’s been chasing and… falls asleep.
It’s not until the 2nd book that the world of Roland really starts to unfold – hell it’s not until the fifth book that the still-living world unfolds; everything until that point was the dying old world that had moved on.
By doing three movies and two series, you get to have all of the big-BLAM Michael-BOOM Bay-POWWW* battles and climaxes, while still getting the slow moving character development in between. Earlier, I’d have said that this series couldn’t have been done unless it were a miniseries like Deadwood, Band of Brothers, Game of Thrones – but then you’d be limiting the audience. The movies+series idea is the best possible way to portray this. I don’t even mind changing the timeline up a bit for the theatrical version, much as it may chagrin the hardcore literature-devotees – go ahead and open the film up with Book Four, then have the series pick us up in the town of Tull.
I’m not going to say that the Dark Tower is the best thing that King’s ever written, but it’s one of the few of his books that I have read, and it was the reason I’d read other books he’d written.