New 'The Dark Tower' Featurette Shows Off Weird Monsters, Giant Gun Battles

The Dark Tower opens in a little over two weeks and the lack of marketing and that 95-minute runtime rightfully have fans of Stephen King's beloved horror/fantasy series concerned. After years of development, could this long-waited adaptation arrive with a whimper instead of a bang?

It's a question worth asking (and worrying about). But for now, this new featurette practically doubles as a new trailer, offering all kinds of new footage while various talking heads discuss the finer points of King's "magnum opus."

If you're a complete and total newbie to the Dark Tower mythos, this featurette won't help you too much. The bulk of it is Idris Elba's Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger from a ruined world, leaping through the air and unloading his revolvers in the general direction of a bunch of bad guys (including Matthew McConaughey's Big Bad, the Man in Black). It's telling that this featurette leans on the action – rather than sell the series' complex mythology, which blends western, horror, fantasy, and science fiction concepts; Sony wants people to know there are a bunch of gun battles in this one.

Oh, yeah. There's also a big monster, as seen in the image at the top of this article.

The novels are chock-full of monsters and creatures and demons and robots and unpleasant supernatural entities, but this is the first time footage from the film has really showed us one of them. I'm not entirely sure what this thing is, but he does appear to be emerging from a "thinny," a place where the fabric between two separate dimensions has worn thin. In simple terms, this is most likely a monster just wandering from one world into another to threaten our heroes with a little bit of CGI menace.

The Dark Tower hits theaters on August 4, 2017.

There are other worlds than these. Stephen King's The Dark Tower, the ambitious and expansive story from one of the world's most celebrated authors, makes its launch to the big screen. The last Gunslinger, Roland Deschain (Idris Elba), has been locked in an eternal battle with Walter O'Dim, also known as the Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey), determined to prevent him from toppling the Dark Tower, which holds the universe together. With the fate of the worlds at stake, good and evil will collide in the ultimate battle as only Roland can defend the Tower from the Man in Black.