The Long Walk

I started reading Stephen King in 1989, in advance of the release of Pet Sematary. I'd seen several King adaptations before, like Carrie, Cujo, and Christine, but I was younger then. Pet Sematary came out when I was 12, and I was an avid reader, so I wanted to read where it came from. The next year, I discovered a Stephen King Book Club. It was like the Columbia House Record Club, only with King's hardbound books, sending me a new book from his catalog at random. One month, I got the compilation of his four Richard Bachman novellas; Rage, Roadwork, The Running Man, and my favorite of the bunch, The Long Walk. Something about it was hypnotizing. Horrific but beautiful. Over time, many of King's books became movies, and the quality wavered. The Long Walk always seemed like a natural fit for a movie, and yet, year after year, it never happened. It took 35 years for The Long Walk to finally make it onto the big screen. I was afraid my decades of anticipation had set an impossible bar, but I went in hopeful. The 12-year-old me deep inside was excited. For the most part, young me got what he wanted for so very long. For the most part. The set-up of The Long Walk is simple: in an unspecified year in the future, American society is in shambles. The economy is in freefall, and the government has gone full fascistic military junta. The Long Walk is a contest of 50 young men, who must maintain a 3 mph pace indefinitely, until there is only one left standing. He gets insane wealth and one limitless wish. The rest get shot in the head along the way. The story is about the boys who participate in it one year; the friendships that blossom, and what they discover about themselves. It is a very talky story, but it's all character-driven, and fortunately, the characters here are (for the most part) very well defined. Everybody has their motivations for enrolling in a contest that guarantees death for 49 out of its 50 participants. The bulk of the movie is finding out about each of the characters, who they are, why they signed up, and what they learn about themselves along the way. It's sort of like a coming-of-age movie, albeit with a body count. You get to know these boys, both through great writing and acting, so when one of them "gets their ticket", it lands uncomfortably. The growth and development of the characters is key to the movie's enjoyment, because otherwise, this is one bleak, hopeless movie. There isn't a lot of world-building -- just vague hints of economic disaster and societal collapse, and the omnipresence of The Long Walk's ruthless steward, The Major -- but what you get is enough to paint a picture where you can almost sort of understand why boys would sign up for this: because the lottery-level odds of dying versus the potential ticket out of the wastelands of poverty is better than living in it. There's no hope to be found here for the protagonists to find a way out, one weird trick to beat the system; it's walk or die, and every one of them has made peace with it. Some might find that isn't enough world-building for their liking, but I think that misses the point; if you want some fully-realized dystopian future movie, go watch 1984 or The Hunger Games. The Long Walk doesn't need every detail of the world to be filled in. It provides just enough depressing framework for The Long Walk to make sense existing in it. There are, naturally, changes from page to screen, and most of them are fine. The book has a field of 100 participants; the movie winnows it down to 50. The book's mph requirement is 4, while the movie is 3 (a more realistic pace, even King has admitted). These changes are for the better. What is up for debate, however, is the change to the ending, and the prevalence of the socio-political elements. These are heavily intertwined, and I don't want to spoil the ending, so I have to be vague here. What it boils down to is this: the book definitely has political ideas being expressed, but they're said. In the movie, they're yelled. It is impossible to watch this and not see The Long Walk's more politically-driven moments as direct commentary on our world today, where the book was a bit more circumspect. This extends to the ending, which, while changed entirely, is still just as bleak as the book, but in a whole different way. I don't mind turning up the volume on the socio-political aspect, but it's a little ham-handed. The ending ... I'm honestly torn. The ending of the book is haunting and poetic, but it's very much a book ending. The movie's ending makes more sense, and is honestly more heartbreaking than the book, but it's also very Hollywood and more than a tad on the nose. I waited a long time for The Long Walk. When I first read it, I was about 13. I have a 13 year old of my own now. I still don't see why this couldn't have been made 30 years ago, but I'm glad to see it finally get the adaptation that's been long overdue. It's not always the most graceful, and I'll be chewing on that ending for a long time, I think, but I'm not disappointed one bit. I don't know if there's enough blood and carnage for the average horror fan, and I know the political leanings of the movie will alienate a certain section of the populace (too bad, so sad), but I enjoyed it. There's a part in the movie where one character says to another that he has learned that to enjoy life, you have to celebrate and embrace moments. For an hour and forty-five minutes, I got to embrace a moment I'd been waiting to happen for more than half my life. That's good enough for me.