The Long Walk

Based on a novel that Stephen King wrote in his freshman year at college before publishing it 12 years later, in 1979, under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman, The Long Walk has endured an aptly arduous journey to cinemas. George A. Romero and Frank Darabont are among the filmmakers who held the rights before dropping out of the race, and only now, as King turns 78, is the page-to-screen marathon complete. But boy, does Francis Lawrence prove a worthy winner.

No stranger to deadly dystopian contests, having directed the last four Hunger Games movies (and with a fifth, The Hunger Games: Sunrise On The Reaping, in production), Lawrence transposes the action from the author’s home state of Maine, with its windy roads and verdant forests, to an unspecified territory (filmed in Manitoba, Canada) comprised of ceaseless flatlands. And so our young men, selected by ballot, walk for 350 miles along a rigid line of asphalt through endless fields under a huge sky. Heat scorches. Rain pummels. Cold nights stiffen the muscles. Pockets of gothic Americana (all those isolated churches!) only thicken the atmosphere of oppression. And any boy who receives a third warning for dropping below 3 mph is shot dead by soldiers.

Makes bold changes to the source material, but neither sanitises or dilutes.

“I’m proud o’ y’boys!” growls the General (an excellent Mark Hamill), never removing his impenetrable sunglasses. “Y’all got sack.” But what happens when they cramp? Or blister? Or, brace for it, need to defecate? Well, just as the tournament is beamed live, 24/7, to millions of viewers, so Lawrence’s camera never flinches. Screenwriter JT Mollner (responsible for ace serial-killer flick Strange Darling) has made some bold changes to the source material, but neither sanitises or dilutes. This horror-thriller, like the discipline it chronicles, is gruelling and grimly violent, with the punishment concentrated by the monotony of the terrain, and by the script’s refusal to open out the action by cutting to more than the barest minimum of get-to-know-the-boys flashbacks. “WARNING!” cry the soldiers at every speed violation, and viewers would do well to listen: King wrote The Long Walk in the late ’60s as an allegory for the Vietnam War; now, it feels no less bleak for tapping into the financial nihilism of our times.

And yet, from this road coated with the ashes of death rises a phoenix — or should that be mockingjay? — for many of the boys engage in banter, support one another in peril, and share unsentimental tales of their hardscrabble lives. Together they chant, “Fuck the Long Walk!” to the cameras in a fist-clenching, heart-swelling show of defiance. And Garraty and McVries (Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson, both superb) strike up a deep, touching friendship. Forty-nine out of 50 might have to die, but the State will never kill the human spirit.