The Long Walk does an astounding job of bringing the source material to life and both honoring the original but also updating it in dozens of minor ways to show how the story of young men walking to their death is still a poignant parable. Great cast. Great choices. It is perhaps only the ending that ultimately fails to convey the horror.

Summary

(excerpted from Wikipedia): The Long Walk is a 2025 American dystopian survival thriller film directed by Francis Lawrence and written by JT Mollner. It is based on the 1979 novel by Stephen King. Set in a dystopian 1970s, the film follows fifty boys in an annually televised competitive walking contest, meant to inspire viewers. Each boy must maintain a pace of three miles per hour (4.8 km/h) of nonstop walking for days, and failure to do so after three warnings results in death. The boy who lasts the longest wins a large cash prize and the fulfilment of one wish of his choice.

Content Warnings

The Long Walk is a fairly bleak story in an oppressive society. Numerous gun shots to the head and body are shown in some detail. A few of the guys suffer from pretty heinous injuries and afflictions. Some homophobia is present, though usually in the context of “lad talk” and is actively opposed by other characters.

Review [Spoiler Free]

The best praise I can give to The Long Walk is just how well everyone involved understood the assignment. Director. Actors. Camera-folk. Composer. Extras.

It brings about an effective and haunting version of a book in which a metaphor for the Vietnam [and other] War[s] meets the kind of societal expectations where we are supposed to embrace a dog-eat-dog world and compete against people who could be our friends and co-sufferers.

The movie embraces this down to its very core. People on the verge of death, where there can only be a single winner, finally finding friendships that was denied to them by a society that has overly toxified the masculine experience. That has forced thousands of young men into wars to embolden and enrich the powers that be and then given quasi-religious status only in their death and disfigurement.

Finding friends with people that they know they will never see again after this experience is over. Worse, that they will have watched all these fellow travelers die one by one. In a game where stopping to give witness only sets you up for your own death. In a game where the act of playing it does untold damage to your body and mind and knowing you will never quite recover.

All for an indefinable “wish.” The ultimate irony. If the society has the ability to grant any wish to the sole survivor, then it likely had the ability to grant the wish without the game itself. The suffering, as they say, is the point.

The movie is an orchestra of big and little pieces and it draws the viewer into this mire of hope and despair with neither winning out.

Not every note hits to perfection. Not every line is delivered perfectly. There are flaws and rough spots. All just going on to reinforce an extraordinary whole.

The novel/la The Long Walk is one of the cornerstone books of my life next to stuff like Dune, Lord of the Rings, several Philip K. Dick books, and the works of H.P. Lovecraft. I read it way too young to read such things and it is a testament to how well it resonated with me in that it is one of the only things I read those three decades ago that has stayed with me with almost picture perfect memory. It has haunted me for decades.

I actually got the 4K release about as soon as I could get a copy and then just left it on the shelf for a month or two. I was worried that it would turn that harrowing tale which had so greatly impacted me into spectacle. It must, right? The capsule story of death and despair of 100 men versus a society that applauds it?

My fears were unfounded. It is not a precise retelling. Rules change. The background changes, slightly. Characters change. Motivations change. The pace somewhat changes. Some of it is updating to fit shifts in perceptions, but overall the changes tell the same sort of story in a different way that gives respect to the original.

For example, the original had numerous vignettes about interactions with townsfolk coming out to gawk. In this, most of the watchers are dead silent, barely moving. Just bearing witness. Like a Greek chorus singing louder in silence than any words could convey. There are two exceptions, one of which is one of the darkest moments in the whole movie, but most are just little snippets of an America that is not all that different from right now. People sitting at a table and watching. Cops standing proud. A woman dressed for mourning. Combined with shots of a burning car, a decaying cow, and a destroyed bicycle. A music video style tableaux of scenery that implies both an ultimate isolation and a shared experience of suffering.

While a lot of praise has been given to Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson’s performances, I just want to extend that to so many others. Charlie Plummer finds the perfect tone to make us hate his portrayal of Barkovitch, but ultimately pity him. Ben Wang and Tut Nyot, as the other two “musketeers,” bring the right amount of wall for the mains to bounce off. Garret Wareing as Stebbins was just the right amount of enigmatic. Even Mark Hamill as The Major was effective, though comes dangerously close to humanizing the character in a couple of spots.

All backed up by Jeremiah Fraites’s score which emulates the constant three-mile-per-hour step with numerous tracks hitting a cadence to bring the listener into the constant stride of walking.

The Case Debacle

One complaint I do have is about the plastic sleeve for the steelbook version. When I was trying to take the movie out, the case refused to budge. I had to push hard enough you could hear the case itself popping and feel it warping, and it still wouldn’t give.

I ended up having to cut the plastic sleeve off to get to the movie. It was obvious, then, that part of the printing on the steelcase itself had sort of goo’ed and stuck to the sleeve. It sucks because part of the design for the cover as a whole was contained in the plastic sleeve, but it’s kind of minor in that doesn’t really detract from the quality otherwise. People who are more pissy about their collection might be more upset.

Partially, the ultimate irritation for me is that another Lionsgate release, the 4K steelbook for Battle Royale, had a similar problem. In that case [no pun intended], I was able to get it out by applying constant pressure. After the experience with The Long Walk, though, I just went ahead and tossed both sleeves.

Thoughts on the Movie Ending vs Book Ending vs Alt Movie Ending [Minor Spoilers with Major Ones Obfuscated]

Don’t continue if you are particularly sensitive to spoilers. I’ll only put general hints of the ending in plain text but take it as a warning.

One of the reasons that the book sat with me for all those years is because of the ending. There was a darkness there. A contrast to some of the standard horror tropes where the hero fights the monster. Only the monster of The Long Walk is societal expectations of young men. That cannot be fought. Not by these men, at least. The game is too stacked.

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I will not spoil the canonical ending of the movie, at least not without putting it behind SPOILER TEXT, but I do want to say something first, in ALL CAPS and bold because I consider this to be important. If you want to think I’m shouting this, I sort of am…to my little weird/speculative fiction review blog:

THE ALTERNATE ENDING IS THE ONE I WISH THE MOVIE WENT WITH (with one exception).

Now for the deeper spoilers. I’ll try and arrange this in such a way that each paragraph gives a lot more, starting with the part that I will not obfuscate because it is obvious.

I am aware that the premise of the movie is that only one person survives. That all friendships and hardships are for nothing except for one person. Even for this one person, they must survive watching all these other young men die and live in a society that has allowed such things to happen.

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That being said, the text that goes with the new ending was largely pointless. It merely stated what we could have guessed already.