Saw the Dark Tower movie on Saturday, so I had plenty of time to organize my thoughts, so here it goes. SPOILERS for the movie and the books of course.

The good

The casting of Roland & Walter. Idris Elba is a great actor, Matthew McConaughey portrayed a chilling Walter.

The gunslinger in action. The Dixie Pig shootout was amazing (could've been a bit longer tho), it was great to see Roland in action, showing his full potential. The village assault was passable, but Roland was injured, so that's ok.

The references. It was great to see Christine, 1408, etc. and the Tet Corporation logo was a nice touch.

Now on to the bad stuff, which is everything else, really.

The biggest problem is that everything was rushed. No breathing room was allowed to absorb the story beats, we jumped right onto the next step. Which could have been a good thing, however, the story we got was a pretty generic one with familiar twists and turns - a washed out, dumbed down version of King's original.

Jake's backstory was hollywoodized beyond the the point of recognition. Roland's backstory was virtually nonexistent. His father was portrayed as a generic loving dad (just like Jake's), who fought side by side with him, which is plain wrong.

Many story elements were oversimplified, dumbed down or made family friendly. At 95 minutes, there is no time for learning the intricacies of the world Roland lives in. Case in point: the breakers were never strapped into chairs and the act of breaking the beams was not painful for them. I understand why they changed breaking the beams to directly attacking the structural integrity of the Tower - it visually made for a more shocking sight - but many many details were omitted or changed to make the story more generic.

Roland's characterization. As I said Elba is a great actor, so it's not his fault that he was give next to no material to work with. He was basically the embodiment of every cliché lone wolf action hero who is paired up with an unlikely companion and in the process, learns love. Ugh, no. Also, Roland's motivation was always getting to the top room of the tower. It was a big mistake to only have revenge on Walter as his motivation. It felt really wrong.

The meat of the story is missing. And I'm not necessarily referring to the absence of Eddie and Susannah. I'm talking about the fact that Walter was only a sub-boss, not the real bad guy, and that there is much much more to the world than what was given in the movie.

Walter's powers were inconsistent and how he used them, did not make sense. OK, the "don't breathe" trick doesn't work on Roland, but Walter still has telekinesis. He can just grab a big rock with his magic and bash Roland's head in while he is sleeping at a campfire. Right? If not, why not? This was not explained at all in the movie.

The trick Roland uses to defeat Walter is stupid. Don't get me wrong, it looked really cool, but the second bullet was fired later, and had to travel more distance, thus it would have never been able to "catch up" with the first one. Roland has no magic powers, he only has his wits, and his skills with his revolvers. He cannot change the laws of physics, sorry.

Did Roland and Jake seriously blow up the facility where tens (if not hundreds) of innocent kids were held captive??? WHAT THE FUCK.

The story we got is too black & white and too neatly concluded. Oh, the evil guy who wanted to destroy the world is gone, that's it then, let's go home. For someone who did not read the books, the takeaway would be something like: "King wrote this story in 7 books...? Wow, he is really not efficient with words LOL"

In conclusion: the biggest flaw of this movie is that... it is a movie. A 95 minute movie at that. There is no time for anything but generic characters and a generic story with some hints of potential here and there. It was just insane not to make this at least a 10 episode series. With the craze around GoT, a new fantasy series would have been a guaranteed hit. They were really stupid to not capitalize on that - because this is what we get in 95 minutes.

5/10 - had some good elements, but overall a huge disappointment.

EDIT: upon thinking about it in the last weeks, I need to lower my rating to a 4/10. The easter eggs and references feel more like an insult in retrospect. Like the creators are saying: "Yes, we know what we cut from the books. Yes, we know what we changed. Here is this Crimson King graffiti to make you forget about that." Were it not for Elba's and McConaughey's performance, it would be 3/10 even.