No One Really Wins

Years and years ago, back when I was very young (I’m slowly realizing I’m not that young anymore) I was very into Stephen KingRising to fame with the release of his first book, Carrie, Stephen King is one of the most prolific, and most successful, American authors (in any genre, not just horror).. My mom had a huge collection of his books (in fairness she had a huge collection of books in general) and I latched on and started reading my way through everything she owned. Famous works, short stories, novellas, oddities. If it was one of his, I read it. This is actually how I am with a lot of authors; once I find one I like I latch on and read everything (but it’s very hard for me to find one I can latch onto).

That phase lasted for a while and it meant that I read so much of his library at the time. Included in that were “The Bachman Books”. If you aren’t familiar, back in the early part of his career, King bumped up against his publishing team because the author was very prolific, finishing multiple books in a year, while his publishers didn’t want to flood the market so they refused to publish more than one or two per year. Feeling like he was being stifled, King found a workaround. He made a deal with another publisher and put out some of his books with them under a pen name, Richard Bachman. Five books total were originally published under the pen name, and four of them – Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, The Running Man – were later collected as “The Bachman Books”. I read them all.

Eventually King was found out, people putting together that he was, in fact, Bachman, especially after the fifth book, Thinner, came out. You can see why, too, because that novel was definitely more of a Stephen King-style book than the other titles he put out as Bachman. The other four don’t feature supernatural elements or horror. They’re more down-to-earth, grounded in a way that his books normally aren’t. And of them, until recently, only The Running Man was adapted for the big screen. Except now we also have The Long Walk, and if you know the novel, well, you know this wasn’t going to be an upbeat movie.

Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) is one of fifty young men chosen for the annual sporting event, The Long Walk. In this walk, the men will walk, starting near the board of Canada in Maine, and they must maintain a walking speed of 3 MPH. If they don’t they will get a warning. After three warnings, that’s it. As we learn once the walk commences, they walk or they die, with the military protectors following them shooting any man in the head that fails to keep up (or who tries to escape, or fights back, or anything else). Why do this, then? Because if you win, the last one still walking after all fifty are whittled down, then you get the prize: all the money you want and one wish fulfilled. Any wish, whatever it is.

Ray got in this because he wants that wish. He wants to wish for something so important that it changes the world. He makes friends with another walker, Peter McVries (David Jonsson), and the two of them help support each other over the hundreds of miles they have to go through. Without Peter, Ray couldn’t keep going, but it’s never clear if it’s the same for Peter. There’s a light in Peter, something special that keeps him going, and he, too, is walking to find a way to make things better. Everyone wants something, and, one by one, as the boys are eliminated, we learn bits about their lives before they die. But there can only be one man left standing, so someone, even between Ray and Peter if it came down to it, is going to have to die.

To put it bluntly, The Long Walk is a depressing movie. If you didn’t know how the film was going to play out at the start, you learn it quickly once the first kid gets shot in the head. And the film doesn’t shy away from the brutality of it all. The first couple of deaths in the film are hard to watch. Cruel, degrading even, and gory. The film is a sci-fi dystopian thriller, but it leans towards horror at times. It has to if it wants to see the awful brutality of this whole event to the audience watching. To us, the ones that paid to see this film.

The Long Walk is the kind of work that says, “you paid to see this, so you’re going to see all of it.” It doesn’t hold back, showing us the brutal deaths, and degrading lows, the disgusting things people have to do just to survive in this situation (one kid gets the runs, for example, and it’s not pleasant). But that’s also how the film gets us to connect with the characters more. We understand what they’re in for, especially since the film is unflinching about it, so when we learn about these characters and get to know them as people, we feel it when they die even more.

It’s a trick that this film understands that many other horror films do not. There’s a solid handful of characters we will get to learn and know and care about, whereas most other horror films tend to stock their cast with nothing but fodder and cardboard cut-out characters. If this film did that we wouldn’t care. All the bodies could fall and it wouldn’t matter to us because there would be no connection. But grounding the film with Ray and Peter and then giving us a few other characters around them that we can like (and some we can hate) makes each and every death feel more substantial. It’s rough.

As someone that has read the book I did notice a few changes, some of them more significant. Some characters are different, and quite a few are omitted (which makes sense since the film halves the number of participants from 100 to 50). This does change many of the character interactions and shifts things around a fair bit. The ending is also changed, although I won’t spoil that at all. I think that was done as much to keep viewers on their toes as anything else, but it also ties in well to the themes of the film so I didn’t really quibble about it.

What’s really important, though, is that the two leads are phenomenal. Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson really nail their roles as Ray and Peter. They are able to sell the instant bond between the two men, how they went from meeting each other for the first time to becoming brothers over a few hundred miles. You enjoy their company and feel for them when they have to watch, over and over, as others in their group die. Having two you care about also makes it harder when you know, eventually, one of them has to go. There’s no out here, one will die, and it’s a gut punch when it happens. That’s a credit to the two men who have nothing to do but walk and talk and just through that alone they’re able to make us care about both of these men.

But The Long Walk is a depressing film. There’s no getting around that. This is a brutal, dark, gut-wrenching film that never lets up. Any moment of brightness these characters experience on their walk is quickly destroyed by a gun shot a few moments later. There’s no real hope, no real chance, and no real winners on the walk. You live, or you die, but you can’t really say that you win no matter who comes out on top. The film displays that perfectly, and it’s a great adaptation because of it. But I also doubt, having sat through it and suffered along with the characters, that I’ll ever want to watch it again. I’m glad I saw it once, and that was enough.