There was a time in this nation when there would be calls to postpone the release of this film. When a shooting that weighed on the national consciousness – which one this week, you would be right to ask – would be enough for the loudest voices in the country to call for boycotts, bans, or at the very least a moratorium on a movie such as this.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one for moral outrage. I don’t believe in censorship. And, frankly, the righteous indignation meter is so constantly running on full that we live in a perpetual state of crying wolf. What bogeyman is bothering you today? A pop star? A children’s cartoon? An early-education influencer? At a certain point, you have to tune it out because the outrage isn’t real. It’s meant to provoke. It’s meant to steal your energy and wear you down so you’re too exhausted for the fights that do matter.
I mention all of this because if the latest Stephen King adaptation, The Long Walk, is about anything, it is about the normalization of violence and what happens to our humanity when we cease to be shocked by the horrors around us. You have probably seen the moment in the trailer when a young man is shot to death and one character turns to another to say, “I keep hoping that part gets easier.” The response: “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
One of the great triumphs of Francis Lawrence’s film is that the violence never gets easier. Death is never less than horrific, and to the great credit of the filmmakers, every death means something. Lawrence, of course, is well versed in dystopian fiction in which young people are made to play out a sick dance of death for the benefit (and control) of a mass audience, having directed four of the five Hunger Games movies, with another on the way.
The Hunger Games franchise is fun, but it’s glossy, PG-13 YA lit stuff. This is hard ‘R’ because it must be. This is not about cute kids (alright, there’s one cute kid, but his fate is just as horrible as the rest) in an artificial reality. These are young men, mostly 18-25-ish, beaten down by a world that has nothing for them – no opportunity, no hope, no future. Not since a vaguely alluded to war allowed a totalitarian government to come into power and that regime unsurprisingly has tanked whatever economic prospects the people might have.
The only opportunity to improve one’s lot in life: win a lottery to represent your state in The Long Walk, a televised death march, at the end of which the sole survivor receives untold wealth and the granting of a single wish. As for the rest, the luckiest receive a bullet to the head. For others, it’s much worse.
Lawrence and writer JT Mollner (Strange Darling) waste little time in getting us on the road. We meet Ray (Cooper Hoffman), the lucky winner who gets to represent the state where this year’s walk takes place, and his mom, Mrs. Garraty (Judy Greer). Greer is wonderful in the couple of brief scenes we get her in, communicating a lifetime of devastation in just a couple minutes’ screentime. She drops Ray off at the starting line, where we meet a selection of other participants, and we’re off.
Mollner’s script is efficient and effective in letting us know who each of these characters is. Some of them feel stock – this is King’s first novel, after all – but they are imbued with depth and life by a tremendous cast, including Ben Wang as Olson, Roman Griffin Davis as Curly, Charlie Plummer as Barkovitch, Garrett Wareing as Stebbins, Tut Nyuot as Baker, and Jordan Gonzalez as Harkness.
The most important of Ray’s fellow walkers is Pete, played by David Jonsson. You might recognize Jonsson for his incredible turn as the android Andy in last year’s Alien: Romulus. He delivers the performance of the film as Ray’s friend, confidant, and mirror image, offering light to Ray’s darkness, hope to his despair. Hoffman, who is also excellent, and Jonsson have a natural chemistry that carries us through long stretches in which the film gives itself over to the two of them sharing, philosophizing, and simply being there for one another.
Mark Hamill, in his second King adaptation this summer after The Life of Chuck, plays The Major, ostensibly the villain of the piece, though the real villain is the society that permits all of this to take place. He is a suitably malevolent force, commanding a squad of faceless, nameless soldiers who carry out the will of the machine, executing young men for daring to need the most basic elements of survival and humanity.
Many of the things you might expect to happen in this story do happen, but the ways in which they happen are consistently surprising. While some characters start as clichés and variations on themes we have seen before, the story evolves away from the trite and into the specifics of each, succeeding in giving us a cast of characters we truly care about and making it all the more devastating for what we know must happen to them.
But, why must it happen? It happens because society not only allows it but insists upon it. The Long Walk is meant to give viewers hope – you, too, may someday be lucky enough to rise from your station – and pride – look how far the boy from your state got before he was massacred! Early on, we learn that although all of these boys volunteered for the lottery, none of them has ever met a person who didn’t volunteer, which makes a strong point about the illusion of choice under tyranny.
King published the novel in 1979, when it was largely seen as an allegory for the Vietnam War, the draft, and the senseless violence to which the nation was a party. That metaphor holds true enough, but in an age in which we are inundated with violence and death on levels never before imagined, it means something more. Of course, we still send soldiers off to die. We still send weapons to aid in the deaths of women and children in far-off lands. And, we still drop bombs on people we have never met for reasons that are vague at best.
But, here at home, we send children off to school with little more than thoughts and prayers that they will make it back safely at the end of the day. Most of them do. Some of them don’t. One should be too many, but it seems now there will never be enough death to spur us into action. The Long Walk is a visceral examination of the world we have built and a reminder that goddammit, it doesn’t have to be this way.
