Every year, fifty teenage boys meet for an event known throughout the country as "The Long Walk." Among this year's chosen crop is "Maine's Own," Ray Garraty. He knows the rules: that warnings are...
Kinda embarrassed to admit the last Stephen King adaption that I’ve watched was all the way back in 2022 with that godawful Firestarter reboot. Since I missed my chance to watch Life of Chuck earlier in the year, I gotta make up for it with “The Long Walk”, one of Stephen King’s earliest novels.
God, did I cry watching this. It is that damn depressing.
One director who embodies the key characteristics of literacy naturalism down to his core is Francis Lawrence; as someone who normally balances ground storytelling with more large scale spectacles, this is every bit as visceral as his previous directorial outings. With surgical precision, there’s a barely concealed ruthlessness behind his direction that’s deliberately more pensive and measured in spite of the more commercial wrapping surrounding the film.
Upon surrendering itself and being beholden to the rules of the literal game, this production design is minimalism at perhaps its most abrasively retro and barren. Like walking through a thick swamp and bog, everything is humid, suffocating and feels downright foreboding with an oppressive atmosphere except it’s more Grapes of Wrath with impoverished dust bowl deserted landscapes which flanks whatever and whenever the singular length of asphalt ends. Expectedly, this portrait of America feels like an apt mirror for our own, cracking frame by frame until all but a single piece remains. Nicolas Lepage’s construction here is a tightly-wounded hourglass that refuses to fully fill in the exact history of its own world which does help with the immersion.
Jo Willems’s cinematography doesn’t have to do much to build off of that with an at-arms-length framing, a desaturated color palette and naturalistic organic lighting that actually looks and feels appropriate. Visually sparse, an excessive use of mediums and close-ups do much of the work and it somehow feels accessible despite the repetition. Editing might not stand out but simplicity is the name of the game here.
Pacing can feel deliberately contemplative but it never feels stagnant, the growing wear-and-tear on the costumes further punctuates the true cost of endurance the film wonderfully builds on, and the tension, oh boy, the tension. From the instant it starts, the film’s tension has us teetering on the knives edge through other methods that dial up the constant war of attrition while its pessimistic, despairing tone hits us with an anvil without veering completely into darkness induced audience apathy. Certainly, it’s corny in places but it’s also nothing less than sincere.
Jeremiah Fraites doesn’t wholly adapt to the oppressive atmosphere and tone set; certain piano and synth notes don’t clash but kudos to him for keeping the score mostly somber. Sound design is equally as integral to the action as the character dynamics and I see no point in celebrating the accuracy to the R-rating: for the few spurts of action we get, they do shy away the savageness of the book to the point where I actually had to look away.
I have nothing bad to say about this cast; they’re all extraordinary as they are soulful. All the dialogue might be incredibly on the nose but the characters pick up the slack by being indecipherably raw and human; Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson in particular not only build off their camaraderie so concretely to the point where almost everyone else nearly gets overshadowed, they affirm the very concept behind chemistry.
Now, we’ve all seen some measure of dystopian films before that delve into themes of survival, endurance, and the ethics of a totalitarian regime through the eyes of the younger generation suffering the consequences so how exactly does The Long Walk stand out? Well, by mastering that cornerstone of tension that Squid Game capitalized on wonderfully: inevitability. Simplistic setup and alluring premise aside, this prescient narrative is a methodical practice that’s very difficult to dramatize especially with a film structure as purposefully drawn out as this one. The script goes out of its way to be as ironically static as possible, stripping down enough of the novel’s original ambiguity to be as unfussy and clear as possible…..and it further exacerbates the crumbling reality we all know is steadily approaching. But that barebones hurdle would only take that so far if the characters weren’t up to pick up the slack.
In a story centered entirely about them and their reactions, creating an empathetic character study ensures each character has enough meat on the bone for them to provide a unique perspective on their outlook of the world at large.
The circumstances of these events occurring is almost identical to the manner in which it was executed in Squid Game: the game having come into fruition through a rigged system and wealth being promised or gated by people’s desires to watch others be butchered for sport or fight each other rather than the one’s rigging the game and system. Making all the competitors adolescent boys on top of that, compounding the senseless fallacy of choice while wearing its Vietnam War metaphorical layering on its sleeve, supercharges all its other themes of traditional masculinity, survival under extreme pressure and the mechanisms of state control. Admittedly, keeping the focus squarely on the boys means it only lightly touches upon many of those themes better suited for the outer world but it never loses sight of poking holes through that mirage of selling us on that triple glazed ceiling; yet another movie that feels quite topical with the divided political turmoil in America today.
In a day and age where flashes of death, bones and blood are splattered so constantly and consistently that we’ve likely stopped feeling outrage, it is refreshing to see a film like this outright call us out for enjoying these types of spectacles in a capitalist system specifically designed to beat the humanity out of us and shape us into whatever it decides for us.
Unfortunately, I can’t quite disregard a few blemishes. Once you get a handle on the style and format, the story does get repetitive and predictable fast with the pacing dipping slightly in the second act. For a mostly grounded concept, it does push credulity a little bit with much how long some people were willing to go and while I don’t mind the changes made to the ending, the execution of it felt rushed at best and re-stitched to be subversive for the hell of it at worst.
Definitely one of the higher tier Stephen King adaptions, the strengths of “The Long Walk” lie beyond the eerily timely reflections on living and dying with dignity under a fascist regime; it makes you question endurance, humanity, the cost of survival and all the senseless sacrifices that come with it.
