My earliest recollection of
The Long Walk is from the early 1980s. A friend of mine was reading an edition of it that he had checked out from our High School library. The striking cover art both caught my eye and burrowed into my memory.
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| I love how the film's primary poster art is just a modified version of the original cover art. |
Too bad it did not burrow deep enough to motivate me to read the damn thing. The only reason I can think of as to why I gave the book a pass is that it was marketed as science-fiction and, at that particular time, I wanted to read horror and only horror. If a book did not have ghouls, ghosts, or beasts in its title or plot description, I had zero interest in reading it.
Which was my loss, of course.
I did not crack open The Long Walk until 1987, maybe 88, when it was reprinted and released as part of The Bachman Books omnibus. While each of the four books in that collection had their merits, I felt The Long Walk to be the quartet's most harrowing and memorable read.
Descriptive passages and dialogue from the book have stuck with me and haunt me to this day. A few of those moments managed to make it into this film adaptation that, for decades, I believed was impossible to make.
Because the entirety of The Long Walk is a death march. One hundred (in the book) male youths "volunteer" to walk along a road at an enforced pace, without slowing or stopping, for as long and as far as they can.
When a walker does slow, or is forced by biological necessity to stop, they get a warning. There is a first warning. A second warning. Then a third, and final, warning. Then they are killed.
The walk goes on and on and on and on... until only one is left alive. That is the winner. If you consider that to be winning...
There were two primary reasons for why I thought a faithful film version of The Long Walk impossible to make. First was the subject matter being just too grim for feature film treatment. Second was the cinematic hurdle of making young men marching along a dilapidated highway, and getting knocked off one by one by one with zero mercy, visually interesting and/or dramatically compelling. That is a tall order.
But damn, screenwriter J.T. Mollner (Strange Darling) and director Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games, etc.) somehow manage to translate the bleak ferocity of The Long Walk into a film that, for the most part, works. And does so without taking too many damaging liberties with its harrowing and horrifying source material. But liberties are taken and, well, mileage will undoubtedly vary regarding whether or not they do or do not work in the film's favor.
It begins just as the novel did, with Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) being dropped off at the long walk starting line by his distraught and disapproving mother (Judy Greer). I was sad to see that the signpost commemorating the earliest ever ticket punch was absent. So it goes.
The number of walkers is downsized from one hundred to "only" fifty. Of that group a small percentage is allotted enough dialogue to allow for a modicum of character development. Most of the walkers that do not have any dialogue are the earliest and quickest to get thinned from the group. Save for the very first, played by Roman Griffin Davis (Jojo Rabbit).
As their numbers dwindle, exhaustion and desperation grow. The film does a decent enough job of showing that exhaustion and desperation ebb and flow through the walkers. Because nothing quite gets the adrenaline pumping as fast and as hard as somebody close by, or that you have befriended, getting their ticket punched.
When the film began, I wondered if, perhaps, it was an adaptation that took too long to be made. What with Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, and even Squid Game having covered and mined the very same thematic ground as The Long Walk.
But what differentiates The Long Walk from those others is its stark and unapologetic simplicity. The ending of the book lacked a dramatic catharsis, leaving its readers to wonder what, if any, point was being made. I think that complete and utter absence of catharsis is part of what makes the book so haunting for me.
The film attempts to inject something akin to a ray of hope into it, but it did not work for me, at all. It felt forced, clumsy, and left a sour taste in my spirit. Because I think the movie lied to its audience about what The Long Walk was saying.
King wrote the book when the draft plucked young men out of their day to day lives of quiet desperation and dropped them into the meat grinder of war. I read the book in the aftermath of that era, before school shootings became a semi-regular fact of life.
Post Columbine and Sandy Hook, The Long Walk should have stuck to its core message of America thoughtlessly sacrificing its youth for some make believe greater good without any real benefit or good being achieved.
That the walk never truly ends and nobody really wins. As The Major himself (Mark Hamill) says, there is no finish line. Save for death, it seems.
As much as I appreciated most of The Long Walk, its ending stumble might have ruined it for me.
Well, there is still the book, at least.
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