There is no finish line on “The Long Walk.” The story follows Ray Garraty, a teen living in an ambiguously dystopian America, who enters a lottery to participate in a contest known as the Long Walk. Participants walk until they are the last boy remaining, for a chance to win a grand prize. Walkers must maintain a baseline speed, risking execution if they cannot maintain it.
The book, written by Stephen King under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, was King’s second novel. The movie of the same name was released on Sept. 12 to positive reviews.
Minor spoilers ahead!
I was initially skeptical of this story — from start to finish, the characters are just walking and talking. To King’s credit, you forget that about 10 pages in. The book starts ominously, only hinting at the consequences of slowing down as “getting your ticket.”
It isn’t until we see Curley, presumably one of the younger walkers, get a charley horse and become the first one to receive his ticket via four guns. That’s when we realize what the stakes truly are.
The characterization is a strong point, with last names cycling through the pages as we meet them and then learn how they meet their ends. We come to care about these boys, but the sense of intimacy developed after seeing them devolve into shells of themselves is an illusion — we don’t even know the first names of some characters.
A particularly heartwrenching part of the book was the relationships between the boys. To win means all of those newfound friends must die, yet it doesn’t stop them from forging deep bonds with one another.
In these connections are the boys’ humanity; it’s what allows many of them to walk as far as they do, and it’s what makes the book devastating as we see them die one by one. But how does a thriller crossed with a minimal plot translate into a movie? Surprisingly, quite well.
Director Francis Lawrence does an excellent job of managing the tension between the burgeoning character relationships and the very same characters “getting their tickets.” The relationships are even more palpable in the movie. Tut Nyuot (Baker) and David Jonsson (McVries) stole the scene anytime they were onscreen, while Cooper Hoffman (Garraty) is a force in his own right.
That violence is the other face of the tension, as mentioned above. Fair warning: the movie does not pull its punches in showing everything in graphic detail. Somehow, you’re lulled into a false sense of security after each death, because each new death is just as unexpected and jaw-dropping as the very first.
The pinnacle of the movie was its ending, which was my biggest complaint with the book. I found the book’s ending to be anticlimactic and mildly confusing. The ending of the movie makes some big changes from the book, but it’s ultimately for the better as it turns into the most haunting and dissonant scene of the movie.
“The Long Walk,” as both a book and a movie, is worth your time. Despite a questionably interesting premise, it undoubtedly surpassed my expectations and only adds to the reputations of Stephen King and Francis Lawrence.
