"The Dark Tower" books are Stephen King's magnum opus, a multi-volume series about seers and psychics and destiny. But the movie has sent out its own magical signs since the start.
And each portent pointed to disaster.
There were the multiple screenwriters. The long wait for any kind of trailer. Rumors about frantic, last-minute fiddling. And, finally, a single, up-against-deadline critics' screening.
You didn't have to be a fortune teller to see what all that signified. And it wasn't anything good.
The original "Dark Tower" series is King at his most playful (it mixes together Westerns, horror, fantasy and science fiction) and ambitious (flirting with metafiction, it even brought in "Stephen King" as a character - and ended with a you-choose-the-finale climax).
And this movie takes all that and reduced it to almost nothing.
There is still the righteous Gunslinger, played by Idris Elba. And the magical Man in Black, played by Matthew McConaughey, here making a nice snack of the scenery.
But where's the story? As in - any of the story. We're given no sense of either of the two characters - just told they're locked in eternal, infernal battle, with our cosmic cowboy dedicated to stopping the villain from bringing on a demonic apocalypse.
And why would he bring on the apocalypse? Because he's a Hollywood blockbuster villain. Isn't that what every Hollywood blockbuster villain wants to do? Destroy the universe for no reason?
In fact, the basics of King's story have been twisted to turn this into another young-adult movie franchise, with Jake - a much more complicated figure in the books - now just one more amazing adolescent, a young messiah who's going to save us all (in between dealing with awful adults and making cow-eyes at some other tween).
If for some reason the filmmakers wanted to make a new "Divergent" (although not even the filmmakers who made "Divergent" want that) why drag poor Stephen King into it? Or cast the charismatically challenged Tom Taylor as your juvenile lead?
The director - whose only other feature, bizarrely, was the rather sedate period drama "A Royal Affair" - doesn't seem to have any visual plan except to keep things as dark as possible, for which we should be thankful. The four credited screenwriters seem to have spent most of their time simply ripping up the books.
Casual King fans may be amused at the nudge-nudge in-jokes scattered throughout the film - a nod to "It," plenty of references to "The Shining." But dedicated followers of the series are likely to be enraged. Where's the series' mind-twisting mythology? Why has the Crimson King been reduced to some scrawled graffiti?
Elba is, of course, a commanding presence (enough so that you'll wish he was in an actual Western, and not stuck in this mess). And there are a couple of nicely gruesome touches - like the monstrous minions whose fake faces keep falling off.
But this isn't "The Dark Tower." This is a small, sad pile of rubble - the foundation to a franchise you can only hope is never built.
Ratings note: The film contains violence.
Stephen Whitty may be reached at stephenjwhitty@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @stephenwhitty. Find him on Facebook.