Stephen King began writing his first novel, The Long Walk, a bleak, nightmarish dystopian thriller set in an alternate, totalitarian America, as a college freshman in 1966 at the University of Maine.
The manuscript for King's novel sat in a drawer for more than a decade. When it was published, King’s name was nowhere to be found. The Long Walk eventually appeared on book shelves under a pen name, “Richard Bachman,” over concerns that releasing more than one novel a year under King’s name would over-saturate the market and dilute his brand.
King wrote The Long Walk during one of the most turbulent periods in American history. Between political assassinations, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Vietnam War, America seemed dangerously on the brink of self-immolation and dissolution or barring either, a truly representative, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic democracy or political suppression, right-wing repression, and reactionary authoritarianism. (Alternatives, of course, that still resonate to this day.) For young men in the mid 1960s, including King himself, the military draft posed a real-world, existential threat of a dying in a foreign country in a war of choice for self-interested politicians and the military-industrial complex.
Like almost all of King’s work, adaptation into other media seemed like a foregone conclusion, but it still took the better part of five decades, stop-and-start development, and a confluence of several factors, including a resurgent interest in King’s unadapted works, the popularity of dystopian works on and off the screen, and the involvement of Francis Lawrence (Red Sparrow, Water for Elephants, Constantine), a filmmaker best known for adapting I Am Legend, Richard Matheson’s cult post-apocalyptic horror novel, and The Hunger Games series, Suzanne Collins’s science-fiction dystopia set in an alternate, post-war, post-depression America where the ruling class uses an annual life-or-death tournament to entertain and to pacify the dispossessed classes.
Collins may not agree, but owes a literary debt to King’s seminal work, from the idea of an annually televised tournament created by a totalitarian government to entertain and pacify to a lone survivor rewarded with material comfort and social status, if not actual power, but where Collins and Lawrence emphasized the scale, scope, and spectacle of the Hunger Games themselves, King’s novel and Lawrence’s bold, brilliant, and brutal adaptation all but eliminates the spectacle — and the spectacular — from the adaptation, resulting in a raw, often times grueling, but no less wrenching, experience.
JT Mollner (Strange Darling, Outlaws and Angels) spare, streamlined screenplay makes several minor changes, decreasing the number of walkers from 100 to 50 and reducing the state-mandated pace from four miles per hour to three miles per hour (MPH), and at least one major, risky, potentially divisive change that won’t be spoiled here, The more significant narrative change alters character dynamics, if not necessarily their fates, but also subverts and recontextualizes the hallucinatory ambiguity of the novel's final moments.
Lawrence opens The Long Walk only moments before the endurance contest begins, leaving otherwise crucial details, like the time period, setting, and character backgrounds, intentionally open-ended for the audience. A title card, however, gives audiences everything they need to know about the world of The Long Walk: A catastrophic war and subsequent depression has left a technologically starved America — or whatever’s left of it — under a military dictatorship led by the Major (Mark Hamill in anti-Luke Skywalker mode).
Grinding, never-ending poverty leaves disenfranchised young men with little choice (or really, the illusion of choice), but to throw their names into an annual lottery. The government selects 50 young men, some still in their teens, for the “long walk” of the title. Once the participants start the long walk, they can’t stop for rest, they can’t fall under the 3-MPH limit. If they receive more than three warnings in an hour, the armed, uniformed soldiers accompanying them will "punch their ticket" (execute them on the spot).
While it’s literally “walk or die” for the participants, each step, each execution captured on a camera accompanying them on their walk, Lawrence never cuts away from the young men to the viewers at home, presumably gathered around their cathode-ray television sets. Minus the occasional steep hill, rainstorm, or daylight changing into night and back again, the participants walk in a seemingly straight line, mile after mile on a seemingly endless, featureless asphalt road bracketed on either side by open fields, scattered trees, and the occasional disinterested onlookers.
Where The Hunger Games series turned on a multi-layered critique of the spectacle-driven games as mass entertainment, political propaganda, and an instrument for pacification, the adaptation of King’s novel sidesteps that particular critique altogether, instead foregrounding the young men who, for reasons personal and political, decided to join the long walk, primarily Raymond Garraty (Cooper Hoffman, Saturday Night, Licorice Pizza), the film’s central character and protagonist, and Peter McVries (David Jonsson, Alien: Romulus), the fellow participant Garraty befriends throughout the film, sharing his life story in brief, seemingly insignificant increments.
A key element of both novel and adaptation, the bond Garraty and McVries form throughout the long walk seems paradoxical at first — they’re competitors, after all, and the state dictates only one can survive the ordeal — but it’s also far from uncommon, especially during wartime between soldiers serving in combat, facing life or death together. It’s that sharpness and intensity of shared experience and with it, feeling, that explains their growing bond and eventually, how they individually and collectively face who lives and who dies at the end of the long walk.
By necessity, a feature-length, two-hour film can’t give equal time to or properly develop the other walkers, but Lawrence and Mollner, working with a standout cast supporting Hoffman and Jonsson’s nuanced, note-perfect performances, make each character, each life, no matter how briefly they appear onscreen, matter. How, when, and why they die also matters.
Exploiting the freedom afforded by an R-rating as opposed to the neutered PG-13 rating of The Hunger Games series, Lawrence depicts their deaths in graphically realistic detail, all the more agonizing, harrowing, and ultimately, heart-breaking.
The Long Walk opens, only in movie theaters, on Friday, September 12, via Lionsgate. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.