When Stephen King’s The Long Walk was first published in 1979, dystopian young adult fiction had not yet become a wildly popular genre. With all of its gore and brutality, King’s novel wasn’t really meant for children. But in the book’s story about disillusioned youths being made to march through wastelands as a form of mass entertainment, you could see flashes of the ideas that would become hallmarks of dystopian YA juggernauts like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and the Divergent series.
Though Lionsgate’s new adaptation of The Long Walk sticks closely to its source material, it plays like a movie that has been calibrated to feel more like the stories that King’s original novel inspired. That feels like some of the calculus that factored into the studio tapping Francis Lawrence, who previously directed multiple Hunger Games features, to helm the project. This wouldn’t be a knock against the new Long Walk if its journey took the characters on nuanced emotional arcs mirroring the scale of their horrific pilgrimages. This Long Walk features a number of strong performances, but it doesn’t really have all that much to say about the heady ideas it’s trying to articulate. And the movie is so unrelentingly brutal and straightforward that it winds up becoming a disturbing and tiresome slog.
Set in a nightmarish future where the US has been devastated by war and left in an economic spiral, The Long Walk follows a group of young men who have signed up to participate in the country’s annual televised competition to the death. Each of the competitors understand that to win the grand prize — having any realizable wish of their granted — they have to keep walking along a set path until they are the last person standing. They also know that if they don’t maintain a walking pace of three miles per hour, armed soldiers will give them up to three warnings before shooting them at point blank range. But with everyone’s lives already being so miserable and hopeless, a slim chance of winning is enough to convince The Long Walk’s pedestrians to try their luck.
While The Long Walk flirts with the idea of being an ensemble piece, the movie really belongs to Raymond Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) and Peter McVries (David Jonsson), two of the contestants who make a point of seeing one another as people rather than competition to take out.
Like their fellow walkers, Garraty and McVries are keenly aware that they are always being watched — not just by the trigger happy Major (Mark Hamill) goading them all from the back of an armored tank, but also by millions of other Americans tuning in to the competition from their homes. The walkers are meant to feel as if they are doing something deeply patriotic (in the most twisted sense of the word) as they witness the first stragglers being murdered in cold blood. But Garraty and McVries try to rally the group to keep going by insisting that they’re all in this situation together, and that they’re better off leaning on each other for emotional and physical support in moments when their bodies start to give out.
Though Lawrence’s Hunger Games projects were filled with twists, turns, and spectacle, The Long Walk is marked by a relative simplicity that’s at least partially a byproduct of it being so faithful to King’s book. There is nowhere for the walkers to go except forward, and so the movie spends much of its runtime focusing on the conversations the group has as they try not to give into their exhaustion. Everyone misses their parents, but it isn’t until Garraty starts thinking about how he and his mother (a surprisingly potent Judy Greer) were forced to watch his father (Josh Hamilton) be killed by the Major’s goons for wrongthink that The Long Walk starts to feel like a drama with crystalized thoughts about what living under and resisting tyranny actually looks like.
If the movie spent more time giving other characters that kind of traumatic interiority, it might have been able to work better as an allegory for the violence inherent to societies that treat young people as fuel meant to be fed into the machine of empire. McVries is able to see the pain that Garraty carries within himself, but The Long Walk puts more energy into trying to chill you with nauseating shots of how most of its characters meet their ends.
The first few deaths — some of the walkers get too many warnings, others’ ankles break, and a few simply keel over — are genuinely arresting. But after about the fifth closeup of someone having their brains blown out onto the asphalt, those moments start to feel like they’re being deployed purely for shock value. The shock of it all doesn’t quite work here, though, because of how inevitable on-the-road death is within the context of this story.
The Long Walk is at its most interesting when Lawrence fixes the camera on the desolate and lonely landscape the walkers are trudging through. It’s never clear whether the handful of onlookers you see watching from the sidelines are enjoying the macabre parade, or if they also feel trapped in a system that treats senseless death as a spectator sport.
Because there is such a pronounced sense of inevitability baked into The Long Walk’s premise, the movie never quite feels like it’s trying to take you anywhere or do anything that you can’t see coming from a mile away. Even with Hoffman and Jonsson giving it their all, The Long Walk is a little too rote to be riveting narrative on the big screen, and it will leave you reminded that, sometimes, King’s work is best experienced in book form.
The Long Walk also stars Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Ben Wang, Roman Griffin Davis, Joshua Odjick, Jordan Gonzalez, Noah de Mel, and Daymon Wrightly. The movie hits theaters on September 12th.
0 Comments
