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| Title: | The Long Walk |
| Year: | 2025 |
| Genre: | Dystopian psychological thriller/psychological drama |
| IMDb: | link |
| RT: | link |
The following review of The Long Walk (2025) is spoiler free, or at least as spoiler free as I can make it while still discussing the main (and final) conflicts. This is true both for the discussion of the film and the original novel on which it is based. If you find yourself disagreeing with this assessment, and wish for more specific spoiler warnings in the future, let me know.
Stephen King has experienced in recent years something of a renaissance — which is not easy to reconcile with his recent writing output (his most recent publication being a re-telling of Hansel and Gretel, which seems to be just a straight-up telling of the story, no different to the version any parent would tell their children, except for the accompanying illustrations by Maurice Sendak. These latter are, as all Maurice Sendak's works, delightfully haunting of course).
This year alone, we have seen on the big screen The Monkey, The Life of Chuck, The Long Walk, and soon also The Running Man, and on the small screen The Institute and soon also the "inspired by" Welcome to Derry. I hope to write about all of these at some point, as well as about the common thread among them, which is how they all wrestle with their source material, but this time we are here only for The Long Walk.
Before we go any further I should comment that The Long Walk is a very unusually structured novel, and getting it onto the screen involved much unusual genre-bending. In other words, some originality was implemented here, and some risks were taken. I, personally, have a soft spot for any film that tries to transcend the tired Hollywood formulas. They invariably stumble, and reviewers like myself will invariably point out where they stumbled, but before I say another word I want to clarify that the attempt itself is admirable, and any criticism I may dish out against such a film is given with much love, and in an attempt to point to others who try to follow in the same footsteps where they should tread with care. I would much rather watch a flawed film that was crafted with original thought than one that is an unblemished work of conveyor-belt craftsmanship.
And with that out of the way, let's talk about The Long Walk.
Most interesting in this respect is The Long Walk in that even though it was published only in 1979, not even first among the Bachman books, it was the first novel King ever wrote, having started it in 1966, during his freshman year at the University of Maine. He just couldn't sell it, even though today it is listed among the American Library Association's "100 best books for teenage readers published between 1966 and 2000". The truth is, his first published novel, Carrie, really does pack much more of a punch. If The Long Walk had been picked up and published first, who knows whether any of us will have ever heard of the name Stephen King.
First works are interesting. I have recently revisited many early works by famous directors (Spielberg's Amblin', Nolan's Following, Carpenter's Dark Star, etc.) None of them reach the heights that these directors later went to, but all of them demonstrate in purest form what each director is "about", their sensibilities, their strengths and weaknesses, and all the traits they would later hone. King's The Long Walk is precisely that: though arguably not the best King, it is the "purest".
In it, King plays his favourite game: take a bunch of people (usually all of a similar age, but not necessarily), put them in a pressure cooker, and watch the group dynamics that unfold as the heat rises. King's reputation as a writer of supernatural horror hides just how much he cares nothing for the monster. The monster is merely there to create the outside pressure. It is the human dynamic that is the soul of his writing. Also, famously, he detests plotting his works, which is why this simple set-up is so effective for him, and why the role of observer, recording societal norms breaking down and inner character bubbling up to the surface as the pressures mount, is perfectly suited for him. He does not need to direct the action, only to document it.
The Long Walk is a perfect storm of such King-isms. The setup could not be simpler: a group of teenagers needs to walk. The penalty of not walking is death. There is one winner. Compare with Battle Royale or The Hunger Games, which both came much later. Their stories are so convoluted. So much explaining needs to be done. King, by contrast, picks an activity that we are all familiar with, whose meaning we understand, and then asks "What if we mount the pressure by raising the stakes?"
Even that trick, of just raising the stakes on a mundane activity, is something King has done repeatedly since. In "The Ledge", the protagonist needs to walk around the ledge of a building (something none of us had done, but which we have seen as a staple in countless films); in "Quitters, Inc.", the protagonist needs to quit smoking: a clear task, a simple raising of the ante, and we are left to see what happens. In the case of The Long Walk, anyone who quits walking is simply shot; there is nothing complicated there.
King is also a humanist in that here (and always) the people trapped in the pressure cooker are good people who try to behave in a civilised manner. In The Long Walk this is perhaps most painful to observe, as the walkers are knowingly locked into a zero-sum game, and yet never cease to assist each other, playing "against the game" far more than they play against each other. (The story, in this sense, is an antithesis for Golding's Lord of the Flies.)
At the same time, King is also a pessimist. His cast always includes one bad apple, and the amount of damage caused by the one bad apple is disproportional to their representation. Arguably this damage here is relatively mild, comparable more with It than with The Shining, "The Mist" or "Langoliers". The point, as it were, is that, as with It, the group is strong enough to ultimately neutralise the bad actor, but that is nothing compared with the power of the pressure cooker.
One last point worth mentioning about King's writing is that while, like all good writing, and certainly like all good writing in the horror genre, it must know with the confidence of an acupuncturist the pressure points of its audience's psyche, King never makes his metaphors too obvious, so well-defined that they can only fit one interpretation. This is the key that makes his writing timeless and universal: each of us is free to superimpose our own mental pressure cooker onto the allegories of his writing.
Just as importantly, King's allegories are specific. They are not generic Jungian archetypes. A key differentiator that makes King's writing stand out is how attuned he is to the details of the worlds he crafts. His writing is always raw and visceral.
Now, I do not subscribe to the Hemingway philosophy of writing, which states that substance abuse aids the writing process, but in the case of King, when he writes like a man possessed, it is often because he is. (King wrote once regarding his novel The Tommyknockers that the mind-controlled protagonists of that book were the best analogy his drug-addled mind was able to come up with for the effects of his addictions. I think this is true for many of his stories. "The Monkey", the short story that inspired the only King film this year that is a straight-up horror flick, is all about a man trying to get rid of a toy monkey that seems to somehow, inexplicably, be linked to much needless violence and suffering that burst out uncontrollably whenever it's around. One would be hard put to analyse such a story without acknowledging that King himself, at the time of writing, was carrying a monkey on his back, which he couldn't shake, and which was systematically sabotaging his life.)
The Long Walk benefits from King's keen observational skills for the human condition, but lacks some of the drive that powers his later works. It was not written with the intensity of a man possessed (for comparison: The Running Man was reportedly entirely written up in just one week) and it was not written by a full-blown addict (at the time, he was something of a drink-loving hippie). His writing in The Long Walk, which is still angry writing, was probably more about the things that occupied his mind in 1966 than about addictions he at that time hadn't yet picked up.
This would perhaps explain why an entire spate of writers and directors, some of them excellently suited for the material, have all tried to adapt this story only to later give up on it, beginning with George A Romero in 1988, who, I imagine, would have tried to make this into a gore-fest but failed. The most notable of these attempts is by Frank Darabont (famous for his King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999)). In 2007, Darabont acquired the rights to the piece, and promised to make it "weird, existential, and very contained". He sat on it until 2018 before giving up. I can't blame him. Getting the emotions of the story out in dialogue, almost entirely delivered by child actors, would have been an insurmountable task.
The person who actually did end up directing the film adaptation we finally got was Francis Lawrence, which was a safe and expected choice given his track record of directing all Hunger Games films (as well as, in the less recent past, such adaptations as I am Legend and Constantine). Lawrence made the correct choice of making this a lean-and-mean $20 million film (counting only the production budget), which made its final $50 million worldwide take borderline passable. He also, wisely, used his production budget to hire Mark Hamill and Judy Greer as the supporting cast, giving Greer the daunting task of carrying the entire emotional weight of the film, despite having only a few minutes of screen time and a handful of lines of dialogue.
Hamill's performance is brilliant, too, but precisely in the ways that get no recognition: his job was to disappear into an emotionless, inscrutable void, reflecting the other characters' attitudes and emotions towards him right back at them.
Hamill also has a supporting role, a larger and more meaningful one, in this year's other off-beat King adaptation, The Life of Chuck, and there his talents are far more plainly on display. But it is also the case that there he has a somewhat better script to work off of. The Life of Chuck was written and directed by Mike Flanagan. Flanagan's oeuvre is almost entirely horror (including some King adaptations: Doctor Sleep and Gerald's Game), much of it on TV, only portions of it commercially successful, and only one project from it won over both audiences and critics: the excellent Midnight Mass. This makes Flanagan a capable journeyman writer, but completely unsuited for the task of The Life of Chuck. (I would have loved to see what a young Rob Reiner, circa Stand By Me, would have done with the material.) By contrast, The Long Walk was written by JT Mollner, who has essentially no meaningful writing credits to his name.
I don't want to be too hard on Mollner. This was extremely difficult material to adapt, and he made many excellent choices with it. For one, he adopted what I consider the secret to a successful Stephen King adaptation: just stick to the source material. In Mollner's case, a good many bits of dialogue, micro-scenes and plot arcs are lifted straight from the original.
He also knew where to stray from the source. We've already mentioned Judy Greer's emotional performance as the main protagonist's soon-to-be-grieving mother. This replaced a role that was in the original the protagonist's girlfriend. Beyond questions about the protagonist's motives in participating in The Long Walk, which are markedly different from book to screen for all participants, this change allowed the emotional support role to go to an accomplished, veteran actress, not yet another child actor.
Another change that works well is reducing the number of walkers from 100 to 50. Not only is this more manageable script-wise, in keeping the number of plots down and allowing the screen-time to be used for a less rushed telling, it is a clear indication of the political undertones of the narrative, assigning one walker for every US state.
Whether the original story was political or not is an open question. As I wrote above, King's writing natively keeps such cards close to its chest. Certainly, when the story was originally published there were critics who analysed it as pertaining to the Vietnam war, but as far as I know any statement directly by King to that effect dates only to after the release of the film. By contrast, the film is not subtle in its lack of ambiguity, with militaristic imagery, especially imagery associated with the Vietnam war, cropping up everywhere. While this definitely shows Mollner's willingness to dive into the essence of the source material and provide a cinematic interpretation of it — which I find highly commendable and not at all par for the course — it is also, for my tastes, somewhat heavy-handed in how it is done.
The original novel was also interested in the spectators, both in-story ones and, by extension, the story's own readers. Like The Running Man, this was, at least in part, a story about economic duress turned into a spectator sport of gamified suffering, and by this an indictment of media sensationalism and the audience's wilful fuelling of it. (In this, both novels are kindred to such works as Network (1976).) Mollner's script avoids this original angle almost entirely, but uses the opportunities it provides in order to update the narrative, and to speak about an America past its economic prime, and the price to be paid for trying to cling desperately to past glories. (Seen in the context of such works as The Running Man, the economic angle can also be viewed as another perfectly valid interpretation of the allegory: it can be seen as the story of what happens when the American dream about how "Anyone can succeed" becomes a nightmare about the price to be paid for success.)
Other changes are stranger and don't work nearly as well. King's original narrative made the geography of the walk very clear, with milestones the reader could follow and attach emotional significance to (even though they were based on a somewhat fictionalised map of New England). By contrast, Mollner's script bafflingly replaces these with title cards providing the number of miles walked, which, emotionally, serves up nothing. Worse yet, Lawrence's direction, perhaps in order to spice up the visuals, strays from Mollner's and King's complete adherence to the perspective of the walkers by providing establishing shots that are drone shots, which portray the walkers embedded in an idyllic countryside. In other words, instead of using the geography in order to convey the terror and exhaustion of the walkers in their ordeal, we are shown scenic vistas in angles reminiscent of Peter Jackson's loving shots of the New Zealand countryside in the walking scenes of his Lord of the Rings trilogy. Instead of pounding the horror of The Walk into us, these shots give us a breather to admire the view, and the final effect is that each time we see the walkers it feels more like a scene from Stand By Me than like the death march that it actually is. (And it doesn't help that one of the changes from book to screen was a lowering of the walking pace, from a brisk walk to a leisurely one.)
On the flip side, I should add that when the camera does stick to the perspective of the walkers, the effect is mesmerising. In some scenes where the walkers slow down and we hear background warnings that they are about to be shot, I felt my own legs, sitting in the air-conditioned cinema, begin to stride in place of their own volition, as though the film awakened in me long-forgotten memories of my own military quick marches.
If The Long Walk (2025) wants to be about the Vietnam war, I didn't think the narrative carries that message through. Yes, it's about boys being crunched up and spat out by a relentless grinding machine that they didn't invent or set in motion, which is being looked on by the rest of the populace in horrifying equanimity, a description for which the war interpretation is apt, but I would not have been surprised if King wrote it while thinking about his own post-graduate studies, for example. (I know I've used The Long Walk myself as a metaphor, when describing the exhaustion felt towards the end of one's PhD.) Or maybe he wrote it as an allegory for the hardships of writing his first novel — also a Herculean task. But when I read the novel initially, as a kid who had very little interest in American history or any of these other interpretations, my own take was that it speaks about life itself, about how each of us ultimately owes a death, and how that isn't what matters, but rather how we spend our lives before that death. The boys in The Long Walk make choices, make friends or not, include or exclude, help or ignore pleas for help. They live, and we, as readers, need to make up our own minds on whether this accelerated life is worthy, given its foregone conclusion.
The script simplifies this story, but not in the typical Hollywood way. It doesn't lean into the emotionality of it, but rather treats its subject clinically, intellectually. Its choice of centring on the Vietnam imagery only makes this more evident, because in 1966, when the story was written, this may have been an open, bleeding wound, but in 2025 dissecting the story in this particular fashion makes it detached from any immediate reality. There are many reasons why Stephen King and cinema rarely mix well, but this is not one: King's writing is extremely emotional, and cinema's peak strength is in conveying emotions. This is why King notoriously dislikes Kubrick's The Shining: because it made an emotional narrative into a cerebral one. And here, too, what could have been a heart-rending yarn is made into a meditation. A worthy meditation, about the banality and infectiousness of evil, but a meditation nonetheless.
Even with only 50 stories to juggle rather than 100, Mollner doesn't stick the emotional landing: almost every plot arc seems telegraphed, and the emotional beats rarely land. Towards the end of the story, one character drops a truth bomb that in the original novel was a gut punch, telling both us and the remaining protagonists that the entire race is essentially a lie and all their perseverance is futile. I heard one person in the audience gasp. For the rest of us, myself included, it was a revelation that meant nothing: there was no setup, so the pay-off that was so shocking in the book didn't land here at all.
In fact, Mollner and Lawrence end up telling little more than one story, about the friendship that develops between two of the walkers. The film, in the end, is about how these two boys, who three days earlier didn't know each other from Adam, grow so tight that they are willing to sacrifice everything for each other, and perhaps even bring down the entire game, with its prize, rather than win it.
This is what I found most problematic about the adaptation, and it's the farthest afield it strays from its source material.
Here's what Stephen King's original novel was about. It's about a cruel game that kills boys by breaking their bodies; those boys that manage to survive with bodies intact — it breaks their spirits; those that manage to hold on to their spirits — it takes away their humanity; and those that hold on to their humanity — it takes away whatever shred of sanity they have left. One person may be the last one standing, but there are no winners.
Mollner and Lawrence drum up nothing remotely like this. The very fact that the final conflict is about whether to bring the game down is completely foreign to the spirit of the novel, where the game is an immutable, cruel reality to be trampled under. In terms of the emotional journey of the novel, it felt to me like Mollner and Lawrence made it only to the end of act 1 or so, having either not understood the depth of horror embedded in the narrative, or being helpless to translate it to a cinematic language. What they did translate cinematically is directed well and efficiently. I have no complaints on Lawrence's technical prowess; but it seems that neither Mollner nor Lawrence knew what to do with the story.
In short, while there is much to recommend about The Long Walk, and without a doubt it was crafted with care for the original material and with an honest attempt to pull off the best possible film out of it — and in some scenes it feels like this succeeded — ultimately the final result is a tame, cerebral exercise that falls significantly short of the existential desperation conveyed by the original. In the same way that King complained about Kubrick that he didn't "believe" in the material, it seems that Lawrence and Mollner do not believe in the depths of desperation, the emotional gut punch and the bleeding scab that is the abyss that is left once the thin layer of humanity is stripped away.
The material is not King's best, but it could have won every Oscar there is, if only its filmmakers knew how to mine it. What we are left with is... well... food for thought.