Alex Wheeler Movie Ops

Long before Stephen King was a legendary author, he was a college student hoping to avoid the draft. It was the ‘60s and the Vietnam War was raging. Luck of the draw determined who would be shipped off to the brutal war, and under this stress, King took up his pen. It’s hardly surprising that he came up with a story about young men plodding senselessly forward, their future bleak and death surrounding them.

That novel, The Long Walk, had long been considered an adaptation nightmare. How to make walking cinematic. How to make monotony gripping. How to make a story of young men talking complex enough to fill 90+ minutes. None of these questions have easy answers, but they all had to be sorted out if The Long Walk was to be a successful film. It was an inauspicious sign that the lone screenplay credit for this adaptation is JT Mollner, a guy who’s been kicking around Hollywood without a major calling card to his name. But he has one now, as he solved all those problems and took some big risks to give this a steady route to follow.

His work is aided by some excellent casting, with Cooper Hoffman (Licorice Pizza) taking up the role of Ray. He’s our primary walker, the guy we follow into the mindboggling scenario, and the one we learn the most about. He’s an only child, his father dead and his mother frantic at the thought of losing the only family she has left. But America has fallen, and in the economic desolation the murky but seemingly authoritarian regime in charge offers an out to young men: a contest to see who can walk the farthest. It’s staged once a year with a contestant from each state, and at the end the winner gets a fortune and one wish. Those who don’t win meet a brutal end, succumbing to the elements, madness, or the guns trained on them if they fall below the required speed more than 3 times.

Walking closely with Ray is Peter (David Jonsson), a gregarious guy with an ominous scar on his face. The two dance around the details of their lives, meting out information between casual conversations that distract from their dire circumstances. The film rarely breaks from their agonizing march, so the dynamic between these two had to be electric. Their conversations provide context, stakes, and rhythm, and the pair pulls off all that and more. Jonsson’s sly smile has a way of instantly breaking tension, and each take in their surroundings with such readable intelligence that lengthy exposition isn’t necessary. As other characters drop off around them, our lack of knowledge of each man and their decline is irrelevant. The subtle differences in their reactions, with Hoffman often tasked with conveying the horror while Jonsson fades into eyes-down dissociation, make the moments less about the details and more about the film’s overarching themes. This is a cultural warning, a plea against indoctrination and the temptingly easy answers given by strongmen.

Ray and Peter’s humanity stands in stark contrast to the looming Major (Mark Hamill), whose humanity remains hidden behind ever-present sunglasses. The Major is the amorphous government, an entity that’s unable to solve the country’s problems and instead gives them a spectacle and false hope. All the contestants go in knowing that winning is a long shot. What they learn, of course, is that there is no winner. Surviving is not the same as living, and the madness of walking until you are utterly alone does not allow for living.

Director Francis Lawrence is no stranger to dystopian futures. He’s helmed all but the first film in The Hunger Games franchise, and the freedom from that series’ PG-13 shackles finally allows him to convey his warning clearly. Every Hunger Games movie suffers from dancing around that world’s rampant death. Here, Lawrence takes no pity on the audience. You watch each bullet, each bone crunch, and the bevy of other injuries and breakdowns that occur along the way. But they aren’t dwelled upon, either. They happen, you watch, and then you march along with the rest of the contestants. This is cold reality for its characters, but it also prevents the audience from becoming numb to the violence. A horror occurs, Ray and Peter deal with it as best they can, and then they lean on each other to get through, recovering just enough to get blindsided by the next horror.

The pattern is likely to hit hard for its American audience, as the country continues to descend further into violence, division, and decay. Authoritarian rule seems but a breath away, and the messaging in dystopian tales like The Long Walk play less as warnings than as immediate alarms. It’s an excellent film, but it’s a hard one to stomach. Hopefully one day Americans can watch it and breathe a sigh of relief when they return to a reality that is far different from this madness.

Release: In theaters now
Director: Francis Lawrence
Writers: JT Mollner
Cast: Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Ben Wang, Roman Griffin Davis, Joshua Odjick, Judy Greer, Mark Hamill