Brutal, harrowing, and an incredible film that plumbs the depths of violence, despair, and friendship. (Spoiler free)
I read The Long Walk novel a few months ago in anticipation of the movie coming out, so I knew what I was getting into with this. But seeing it the same week in America that multiple acts of gun violence were committed, it was hard. Really hard. I considered rescheduling, actually, given that I wasn't sure I could handle even more violence on screen.
The film revolves around a dystopian battle royale-type contest: Young adults in an alternate America volunteer for the Long Walk and are drawn by lottery to participate. The last man still walking takes away the prize — untold riches and whatever your heart wishes. If you stop walking below 3 m.p.h., however, you're shot after three warnings by a slowly moving military vehicle that has rifles trained on everyone.
So, yes, it's like The Hunger Games and Squid Game, in that young people are forced to outlast each other to the death in the face of unspeakable fear and callous violence. But both of those movies feel more removed from our current-day environment, while The Long Walk seems much more realistic in that there's no futuristic capital city, no high-tech arena with sponsored gifts.
The main characters are walking on screen for the entirety of the film, and as the miles pile up, you can feel their exhaustion, dread, and fear. The first half-marathon's length doesn't seem so bad. Just a long walk, right? But there's no stopping. For anything. Watching the participants begin to stumble is gut-wrenching. When one character gets diarrhea, you see it happen in real time, along with what happens to him when he can't recover. The first death is incredibly graphic, and that's on purpose. I saw in an interview that Stephen King mentioned that he had one condition for making the movie: The deaths had to be shown. Why? To make sure that the audience knew that this wasn't just entertainment, and to show the pointless, absurd violence of the march. After that first death scene, I started looking away. It was too hard for me to watch again and again.
As night begins to fall on the first day, you start physically feeling the tiredness and exhaustion of the young men. No matter what, you can't stop, even if your shoe starts filling up with blood from blisters or you twist your ankle. The fear of being brutally shot reverberates through their young bodies as they march on. Sleep is stolen in small bits while hanging on to the person next to you. Every moment, you're reminded that you will either win the entire thing or you will die. There is no other option. There is no second place.
What prevents The Long Walk from just being torture porn, however, is the incredible performances of the actors who are along for the journey. Much like the bonds and alliances that are made in The Hunger Games, the friendships in this film are its heart, and they're truly impressive. In between moments of heart-shattering violence and long-distance-induced body horror injuries, you have a core group of characters that are slowly but surely making their sacrifices count. When they're not running for their lives, they're talking, laughing, and trying to make sense of the world and how they got to be on the Long Walk. Every few minutes, they experience trauma after trauma as they watch their companions fall. Similarly, every few minutes, I would think about how tired they are, how in pain they must be. Imagine walking as far as you'd ever walked before, then having to keep walking indefinitely or else face death.
Ray Garraty and Peter McVries, our two main characters, quickly become fast friends while walking, and their relationship is truly touching to watch as they traverse hundreds of miles across rural Maine backroads.
When I mentioned earlier that consuming this movie is hard, I wasn't joking. I'm not sure what to take away from it. The message that violence is wrong is very clear. But I think what I'll take away personally from it is the power of support during periods of intense, overwhelming fear. You're with these characters in essentially a locked room (except the room is always a small piece of tarmac), faced with the certainty that all but one will die. No matter how it ends, it's going to be tragic for nearly everyone.
I always thought the folks who go on reality shows and say "I'm not here to make friends" were being silly. Of course you're not, you're there to win money. But on the Long Walk, despite offering untold riches, it practically demands friendship to ignite. Why? Because their humanity is at stake. These are young men scared out of their minds, and the other kids aren't the enemy. The enemy is a dystopian system that made them think they had no other choice at a future than to participate in a state-sanctioned murder lottery game. Stephen King wrote the first draft of this story when he was just 19. For context, this was the late 1960s, and it's easy to see the comparisons of the violence in the story to the Vietnam War and the draft. While that was almost 60 years ago, the theme still resonates in the modern era as we face needless violence in other ways.
I'm not sure I'll watch The Long Walk again, but if I do, it will be to revisit these incredible performances and the story that gives you a little bit of hope in a tale full of death.
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Baseline Score: 8/10
POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.
