‘The Long Walk’ Is a Harrowing Reflection of Our Disparities

Stephen King’s first ever novel finally makes its way to the big screen and its message is more relevant than ever before

Lionsgate

“Apparently Elon Musk is only a billion dollars richer than Larry Ellison now,” I half-heartedly muttered to my girlfriend as I combed through an article about the two tycoons trading places as the world’s richest men. I barely registered the words before they left my mouth.

“Only a billion dollars? That’s more than I could spend in twenty lifetimes,” she shot back.

I hadn’t stopped to consider the absurdity of the phrase “only a billion.”

“Good point. Really won’t be long before we see the world’s first trillionaire at this rate,” I responded with a weary sigh before we filed into my car and made our way to the theater to see The Long Walk.

I’d initially seen a preview for the film a couple of months prior as I sat beside my father waiting for the new Superman movie to start. Watching the ad, I was instantly pulled in by the twisted, singular concept of the story: in a dystopian future, a select group of United States citizens are pitted against one another in a gruesome test of endurance. They walk until their feet can carry them no more. The winner is granted boundless riches, and the losers are eliminated by militiamen who roll beside the competitors with tanks and monitor whether they maintain a three-mile-per-hour walking pace.

The one-track nature of the plot— along with seeing Stephen King’s name attached— were enough to win me over before the trailer had even ended. My dad, whose media diet predates the era when graphic violence could be found in every other movie, didn’t have quite the same reaction to the promo.

“Wanna see it?” I asked with a nudge in the brief interim between ads.

“Nope!” he countered brightly as his good-natured grin was illuminated by the beginning of the next preview.

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As my girlfriend and I entered our designated theater, we couldn’t help but notice that the movie was playing in the single furthest auditorium in the multiplex from the entrance. Whether the long walk to The Long Walk was a product of mere coincidence or that the cinema’s overlord had a more devious sense of humor than the writers of South Park, I couldn’t be sure. But when I noticed the nearest men’s room was cordoned off with a series of cones and it dawned on me that I might need to make that lengthy trek again, I quietly began to draw conclusions.

The Long Walk is steeped in the same disparities that make series like The Hunger Games and Squid Game feel not just believable, but scathingly pertinent. They draw on the zeitgeist of our present moment. In my ability to shrug off a billion-dollar difference between our world’s two nearing-trillionaires, I see not only a blistering reminder of the inequalities we’ve grown numb to already, but what makes films like The Long Walk so essential.

Directed by Francis Lawrence, the mind behind the cinematic adaptations of The Hunger Games saga, The Long Walk taps into the same morbid, dystopian magnetism. The decision to task Lawrence with bringing to life Stephen King’s first-ever novel was obvious, and the common threads between the two worlds are immediately apparent. But where The Hunger Games trials are comprised of a series of challenges in which contestants compete for their lives, The Long Walk is one grating, uninterrupted gauntlet.

Front and center in the theater as the film began, it quickly became clear that my girlfriend and I were locked in for one of the most viscerally gripping movies we’d ever experienced. While the vast majority of the film takes place on a single road, the growing tension and changing scenery keep the plot from dragging. Despite breaking almost completely free from the standard rising and falling actions that define most story arcs, our eyes were glued to the screen from the moment the interminable walk began.

Much of what makes the movie so captivating is the chemistry between characters. The cast is comprised of faces that will be unfamiliar to most audiences, but that lack of star power grounds the film. The shaky camerawork also helps to sell the illusion that this macabre game show we’re witnessing is real rather than a polished Hollywood spectacle.

Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Jordan Gonzales, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Garrett Wareing, Ben Wang, and Joshua Odjick each play standout roles among the beleaguered competitors. They’re presided over by a character cryptically labeled, “The Major.” Played by Mark Hamill — one of the only recognizable actors in the entire movie — he leads with an iron fist, barks commands, and ensures that anyone who lags behind or defies the rules of The Long Walk is unceremoniously dispatched.

One of the most striking paradoxes of the film is that it eschews many of the tropes that come with stories that are so horrific. It’s not a horror, but it’s rare for movies that feature such an endless stream of dialogue to be so harrowing. The conversations between characters and their evolving alliances are what make it so painful to watch as the number of challengers dwindles. Their connections intimately deepen as the field thins.

Weathered citizens of the war-torn country line up to soberly observe The Long Walk taking place. Some are affected by the sight, but others stare on toward the competing subjects with a vacant, bleary-eyed detachment.

Among the features that make the film feel so germane are how it depicts the end phase of tyranny. As nations across the globe fall prey to despots, many have been forced to envision the kind of devolution that The Long Walk brings to life in excruciating detail.

As participants of the trial traverse the bucolic countryside, they trudge past broken-down homes, boarded-up stores, fraying banners, and faded billboards. There’s an unmistakable allure to the desolation.

The participants power through oppressive heat and steep inclines and sites of bygone conflicts. But the terrors are punctuated by otherworldly moments of respite. As they continue on, they see the sun rise anew each morning and then watch as the crimson-streaked skies give way to night.

Some even manage to doze off and dream as their legs continue to carry them robotically onward. Hazy dawns yield to thunderstorms and stormy skies open to subsequent rainbows. Days blur and the ever-ticking mile count is the only reminder of time’s relentless crawl.

There are few films I’ve seen that have been so hard to watch, but there’s a strange catharsis in that difficulty. The Long Walk doesn’t depict a reality that’s likely to ever come to fruition. But it gives perspective to the dystopian chasms of wealth and power to which we’ve grown accustomed. Much of what makes movie feel so close to home is that we already live in a world where huge swaths of us would do just about anything to transcend the crushing cycles of labor and poverty we’ve collectively settled into. In each of the contestants, we can’t help but see parts of ourselves.

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