The arrival of The Long Walk seems impossible. The first novel completed by Stephen King and his second published under pen name Richard Bachman, it was dubbed unfilmable due to its sheer, simple brutality. Attempted but abandoned by filmmakers from George A. Romero to King regular Frank Darabont, six decades after completion and 40 years after publication, now it crosses the finish line as one of the best King adaptations.
The book was arguably a dry run by King for themes that he would tackle in later works, most especially in how The Running Man posits an America in which life is a game show prize. This is, however, not our America. Something happened, a civil war followed by dictatorship, economic stagnation, then collapse. All that’s left is an authoritarian militaristic regime playing televised games of life and death for the masses. Well, maybe it’s not so different to our America: poverty, dated cars, outmoded fashion, and a militia whose troops wear no insignia, all under the watchful eye and droning, pseudo-macho philosophizing of the Major (Hamill in a grizzled presentation of callous evil). The only path out of misery is the Long Walk, a game show of sorts: You start walking, you keep walking, and the person who keeps going longest and farthest wins. Everyone else gets a bullet in the head – for the good of society.
Looking at it logically, no one would ever sign up for the Long Walk, and yet young men do, drawn to its promise of poverty-ending wealth and a single wish granted by the Major. King grabs the throat of capitalism as an unfulfillable dream as the long walkers trudge across a desolate landscape reminiscent of Dorothea Lange’s Dust Bowl portraits, force-marching over their co-workers’ corpses. From a purely analytic bent, the likeliest winners are probably motormouthed hick Barkovitch (Plummer), or the stoic and sullen Stebbins (Wareing). Yet the heart and the lens are drawn to cornfed Midwesterner Raymond Garraty (Hoffman) and scar-faced survivor Peter McVries (Jonsson). They represent another of King’s recurrent themes, that of friendship under duress. As Garraty and McVries form the Three Musketeers with two fellow hikers, the painfully innocent Arthur Baker (Nyuot) and the driven Hank Olson (Wang), they become bonded for however long they survive. As Pete so sagely notes, “a short friendship is better than no friendship.”
Scriptwriter JT Mollner puts the onion-layered narrative complexity of his tricksy 2024 meta-slasher Strange Darling behind him with a story that is as straightforward as the road itself and constantly devastating, His changes are often subtle yet effective, like cutting the minimum pace from a brisk 4 mph to a deceptively less daunting 3 mph. Similarly, by reducing the number of walkers from 100 to 50 – one per state – his version makes every death count, whether it takes place onscreen or in one of those time jumps during which their ranks become depleted. That simplicity is brought to the screen with surprising delicacy by Francis Lawrence, a director best known for CG-drenched histrionics like Constantine and I Am Legend before taking over the Hunger Games franchise.
It’s clear there’s no space for action flick heroics here, so what becomes important is how the young men undertake the walk, what makes them place one foot in front of the other. Lawrence embraces the narrative simplicity of Mollner’s script, allowing Garraty and McVries to represent two parallel philosophies of life: of striving for an end versus embracing the next moment for being itself. That The Long Walk arrives in the same year as another seemingly unadaptable King, The Life of Chuck, somehow makes all the sense in the world, because both find a tempered, realistic hope in the shadow of inevitable death. Unlike Chuck, the protagonists of The Long Walk may not contain multitudes. Yet in becoming part of a multitude they, like the film, become great.