The Long Walk is a pretty new movie, but the story itself is fairly old. Stephen King’s novel was published in 1979. I first heard about it around 1995, I guess. I was never a heavy reader in my youth or adolescence. In fact, I couldn’t care less about books; it was simply a waste of time. But somewhere in my mind, I still remembered this story that someone told me long ago, and somehow always thought that it would be a great idea for a movie.
Now, the time is here. The Long Walk is a movie, and I had the opportunity to see it a while back. The story is pretty simple, at least on the surface. A few young men attend a race of sorts. The idea is to keep marching until there is only one left. There are rules. You must keep a certain pace, or you’ll get warmed. You cannot stray from the concrete, and you cannot stop or acquire external help from someone else. If they break the rules, they will receive warnings. There are ways to get rid of already received warnings, too. But the main thing is that you cannot have more than three, or you will get eliminated.
And eliminated is just what it sounds like. They will die, shot by the accompanying military personnel. It’s more or less execution, and it is portrayed in a very grim and unforgiving way. There are no exceptions, whether you have to take a leak or do the other thing. You still have to keep walking. But if you win, you will be incredibly rewarded with riches.
That is the surface plot in The Long Walk. But underneath there are, of course, layers of moral questions being asked. The participants bond with each other during the walk. Some more than others, and they get to know each other. They share their thoughts with one another and engage us as an audience in the moral dilemmas they are discussing or facing during the march.
For me, it’s a bit too much. I very seldom like this aspect of Stephen King adaptations. It doesn’t translate to the screen very well. There might be an inner dialogue in a book where you’re reading every word, but in moving images, it usually doesn’t work. And, to be completely frank, there are way too many Stephen King adaptations that deal with the good vs evil, light vs darkness, even within ourselves. I’m tired of it!
The setting in The Long Walk is basically one. It’s the march. Of course, they’re moving, but there’s really no difference between walking on a paved room or spending the whole movie lying in a bed. It still is one environment. It’s a concept that needs a lot of engagement. We, as an audience, need to be very invested and find it very interesting, or we will not be so forgiving of boredom.
The Long Walk doesn’t deliver. It gets repetitive pretty quickly and boring. It’s never anything that is really bad anywhere in the acting, the special effects, or the pacing, but it never gets particularly good either. The one saving grace I found at the very end was that my assumption of the end was somewhat faulty. I thought I knew exactly how it was going to end, and I didn’t. Other than that, it’s just a boring movie with way too much moral sermon in it.
