What’s it about?
50 young men embark on the annual “Long Walk” across a dystopian United States. The rules are simple: maintain a walking speed of 3mph, drop below 3mph and you get a warning, three warnings and you “get your ticket”. There’s no finish line, and the last man standing wins.
What’d we think?
Adapted from the Stephen King novel of the same name, and directed by Francis Lawrence (who helmed most of the Hunger Games movies), it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that the premise of this movie is far more grim than you might expect – getting one’s ticket is a blunt euphemism for being shot in the head. Sci-fi dystopias frequently rely on some technological gimmick, and YA fiction leans on some invented or exaggerated class division, but The Long Walk is a horribly plausible setting. The United States of this story is an economically-depressed totalitarian state, still clearly reeling from the aftermath of a war that happened long before the main characters were old enough to remember, or even exist.
The book was written by King in the mid 60s, and is an angry, pessimistic take on the brutal absurdity of the war in Vietnam. This adaptation doesn’t try to update anything for a modern audience and in fact doubles down on evoking the visuals and spirit of the era; the antiquated uniforms and vehicles of the soldiers monitoring the walk, the hair and wardrobe, and even the chracter archetypes. There’s the guy with a girl back home. The religious guy. The psycho. The one with coke bottle glasses that wants to be a writer. Instead of coming across as stereotypes, the cast of mostly unknown actors breathe life into their characters, no matter how brief their appearance.
Our central character Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) quickly forms a bond with a few other boys, notably Peter McVries (David Jonsson) who serves as an insightful counterpart to the naturally inquisitive Ray. These two deliver incredibly strong performances, but the whole cast is exceptional, and the fact that a lot of them are less familiar faces really contributes to the authenticity of the characters.
The movie expertly handles the inherent technical challenge of maintaining the audience’s attention – there’s only so many ways you can shoot a bunch of people who are walking and still keep it interesting, in both senses of the word. Francis Lawrence is apparently the go-to director for when you want to shoot kids in the head, and on that front he does a commendable job. There’s a few changes to the source material for practicality’s sake, but none that should cause too much fuss with fans of the book. My only criticism is that the actors are all far older than the book characters (David Jonsson is 32), and some of the impact is lost because of this but I understand that this is the tradeoff to get the best actors you can.
The Long Walk is a terrific adaptation of King’s book, and is sure to be inducted into the pantheon of great dystopian sci-fi survival horror coming of age movies.
