I was catching up on my RSS feeds recently when I saw something about Stephen King assisting with a Dark Tower TV series by Mike Flanagan. I hadn't heard anything about it, but was intrigued as I enjoyed the Dark Tower book series by Stephen King. Well as it turns out, Stephen King is not helping with it after all, but it got me thinking about adaptations of our favorite books and more recently video games.
I know there was a Dark Tower movie several (probably more) years ago with Idris Elba and Michael McConaughey. I haven't watched it as I heard it was not good and right or wrong, I didn't want it to spoil my love of the books. I was also quite skeptical that one could cram 8 books into a single movie and still capture any more than the essence of the books.
This made me consider other adaptations of games and books I've enjoyed. Halo is one of my favorite video games, and after a lot of false starts, they finally released it as a TV show. It lasted 2 seasons before it was unsurprisingly cancelled. There is so much lore in the Halo series and stories that have already been written, primed for TV or the big screen. And while I recognize you can't necessarily just do a one-to-one copy and adaptation, the writers of Halo went off the deep end. It took them 2 full seasons for us to finally see the Halo ring. The biggest thing they did right was show that the Spartans were not "built to be the good guys" and that Catherine Halsey was not the hero she was seen to be in the original Halo trilogy. In the end, the series was disappointing to say the least.
I'm often skeptical of adaptations because they are often so uneven. For every Lord of the Rings, there's a Hobbit. You get some good ones, some okay ones, and a whole bunch of mediocre at their absolute best versions. And when you really love the original work of art, be it a book or a video game, having a poor TV or movie adaptation is even more disappointing that just a bad TV show or movie.
More positively and more recently, adaptations of both The Last of Us and Fallout came out as TV shows. I thought both of them were fantastic. Fallout didn't try to replicate a specific game, but kept the lore and spirit of what Fallout is alive. The Last of Us season 1 was amazing and did a good job of staying mostly true to the game. It gives me hope that the rumored adaptations for Mass Effect and Horizon might be okay.
Maybe I should re-read the Dark Tower series again...