“The Long Walk” paints a relentlessly bleak picture of an endless struggle
Directed by Francis Lawrence
Screenplay by JT Mollner
Based on The Long Walk by Stephen King
Starring Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Ben Wang, Roman Griffin Davis, Josh Hamilton, Judy Greer, and Mark Hamill
To watch The Long Walk is to see a genre stripped bare. Before there was the stylized glitz and glamour of The Hunger Games, before there was the brutality of Battle Royale—hell, before there was Fortnite—there was Stephen King’s 1979 novel written under the Richard Bachmann pseudonym he reserved for his least forgiving stories where a group of young men do just what the title promises: they walk until they can’t. Then they die. Director Francis Lawrence, familiar to fans of the genre for his work directing the last four Hunger Games movies, makes only a few changes to that source material, and even these strip the book down to an even simpler telling. He eschews discussions of the outside world and combines characters to hone his adaptation to a fine edge, as brutal in its simplicity as it is in his violence.
These changes allow the true focus on the story to rise to the surface, not that it was ever particularly subtle. First and foremost, this is a story about war, the reasons it is fought, and its output. As it opens, a group of young men are handed dog tags, and a man in uniform promises them an escape from their poverty, a speech anyone who has ever attended high school in the United States has heard. Among them are Ray Garrity (Cooper Hoffman, Saturday Night), a cynic fully cognizant of the Walk’s true purpose; Peter McVries (David Jonsson, Alien: Romulus), an orphaned optimist hoping to give back to his community; the fast-talking Hank Olson (Ben Wang, Karate Kid Legends); and the abrasive Gary Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer, Moonfall) They are told to maintain a speed above three miles per hour and warned that they will be shot after falling below it for a given period of time. The winner will receive untold wishes and a single wish to be granted.
America is falling behind, they’re told, but each Long Walk brings with it a brief period of economic prosperity. By laying down on this altar, even the dead will bring their country wealth and national pride. King wrote his novel in the sixties about Vietnam, a conflict that chewed through three million lives so America could try and fail to save face on the world stage, but the words of the Major (Mark Hamill, The Life of Chuck) could just as easily apply to any of the wars fought since in the Middle East or whatever fresh hell awaits us on the horizon. While it’s rare to hear it spelled out so explicitly, the economic boom after World War II unarguably taught us that prosperity flows from eviscerated young people, and we’ve spent every moment since chasing it. In case this all plays as too subtle, a crowd sings “America the Beautiful” during a climactic execution. We really reach The Purge-levels of blatancy by the end.
And yet, in spite of its directness and grim subject matter, The Long Walk’s meditations are not just watchable but gripping. We spend a majority of the runtime just watching the cast make their way across America on foot, and their easy chemistry—particularly between Hoffman and Jonsson, the latter of whom follows up his work singlehandedly elevating Alien: Romulus by doing the same here—carries us through scenes that could have played as stilted or dull in less capable hands. JT Mollner’s script never loses sight of the fact that these are (literally) dead men walking, and that lends itself to a certain vulnerability and honesty in the writing and performances alike. There’s an occasional clunkiness here that’s common among King adaptations, with his unfailingly earnest but sometimes cloying dialogue running up against the fact that real people now have to say it out loud, but the cast largely sees it through. Over the course of the walk, they banter, support each other, grow believable friendships, and verbally spar when their competing philosophies come into conflict.
And eventually, they start to die. When the violence comes, it’s sudden and grisly, with serious credit due to the make-up and effects team for the gore they put on display. From that moment on, Lawrence suspends a level of tension for the rest of the runtime. The most terrifying segment comes early: a nighttime climb up a hill where our lead mostly does it in a manic stupor, on his third warning with a gun to his head. There’s no gore here, just the presence of death as near as possible and the sound of bullets ricocheting by as other walkers fall. The Long Walk to this point has felt controlled, but suddenly, the bloodshed feels random and all the more horrifying for it. You’re left pleading for the lights to come back on.
Even once the shock wears off and the anxiety that the end could come at any moment gives way to somber, prolonged farewells as walkers stop voluntarily, there’s a level of nausea. The vulnerability of the characterizations is dialed up even higher here, their screamed final words playing indeed like men who have just had a final realization and are trying to communicate it to the living before the end. The tone is relentlessly, almost one-notedly bleak, with even moments of levity quickly giving way to more death. It is, after all, a story of optimism versus cynicism and the death of the former at war. While Lawrence’s ending is notably less haunting than King’s, both land on a similar idea: it doesn’t matter who the winner is. It doesn’t matter who’s left standing. For some, the war—the long walk to nowhere—will never end once it’s begun.
Rating: B
The Long Walk is currently playing in theaters. You can watch the trailer here.
