The Long Walk, I have to admit, is pretty much the last Stephen King book I ever expected to see adapted.
Not because I don’t love it, because I do – it’s one of my all-time favourites from King, and has been ever since I holed myself up in my room on what was supposed to be a family getaway to read the whole thing in a single sitting. But because that set-up is so limited as to seem like a bit of an uphill battle (pun intended) for a director – a story revolving entirely around a few characters on a very, very long walk, much of the action internal, and much of the character development much the same way.
But that didn’t seem to put off director Francis Lawrence. His version of The Long Walk hit cinemas a few days ago, and it’s a release I’ve been anticipating with great interest ever since I first heard that it was on the way – starring Cooper Hoffman as Garraty and David Jonsson as Peter, it follows the titular long walk of a group of young men seeking to earn an enormous cash prize and a wish of their choice if they can end the last one walking in a gruelling cross-country hike from hell.
The actual walk itself, for me, is where the film soars (or, at least, strolls). There’s something truly, uncomfortably, and brutally visceral about the death match that we follow these young men on – it’s not horror of the supernatural or cosmic, but just the sheer nightmare gamut-run of all the ways that our bodies can fail us when they are pushed to their physical and mental limits. The performances (at least from the walkers themselves) are consistently excellent, particularly David Jonson, who manages to wade his way through some of the more blunt-force monologues with grace, while Charlie Plummer as the paranoid, guilt-ridden Berkovitch might be my standout of the supporting cast as a whole. Lawrence, probably best known for his work on the Hunger Games series, knows how to deliver on the dystopian horror of televised suffering, and with more gore to play with, he does it with ease.
Where the movie loses me somewhat is where it deviates from the beaten path laid out by the book. I don’t think that adaptations need to slavishly adhere to their source material – in fact, the new medium can be a place to bring a different angle to the plot that another might not have been able to – but if you’re going to make those changes, they need to be good enough and interesting enough to justify their own existence, and I’m not convinced those in The Long Walk did. Screenwriter JT Mollner fills out the world with a more dramatic dystopia, one that has taken Garraty’s father from him and is driving his involvement in the walk as a means to take his revenge against the Major (a truly dreadful Mark Hamill, hamming it to the point of no return in a role that calls for presence and gravitas).
I understand why Mollner et al felt the need to expand on this world a little – the story of The Long Walk is, after all, a pretty limited one by its very nature, focusing on nothing more than the arduous trudge and the impact it has on the characters enduring it. But what makes the book such an impressive piece of storytelling for me is the dystopia it implies by the very nature of how appalling the titular walk actually is – we don’t need to be told or shown just how bad things are in literal terms, because the fact that people would volunteer for this hell is proof that whatever they have to go back to really must be bad enough to justify it. Garraty loses his everyman status by virtue of this revenge-centric motivation, and the movie’s final moments – which also deviate significantly from the book – are too blunt for my liking, offering too direct an answer to the philosophical questions posed over the course of the story.
To be frank, I wanted an adaptation of The Long Walk that was just that – the walk itself, in all its brutality and agony and gruelling exhaustion. I got that (mostly) – but I also got about another twenty minutes of world-building that feels both too thin to really make an impact while distracting from the effective meat of the plot. With that said, I’d love to know what you think of it, particularly if you came to it with no knowledge of the book – did you find the world it set up compelling? Let me know in the comments!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Forbes)
No But Listen 