Knock on Wood

The Long Walk is one of many Stephen King stories that have had some adaptation “in development” for decades – though not the first of his novels published, it was the first that King completed (later published under his famous pseudonym, Richard Bachman, in 1979), and a film has been in the works since the 1980s. It’s narratively straightforward, but given its unconventional pacing, an adaptation would not be easy to pull off; perhaps that’s why it took nearly 50 years to reach the big screen.

Now, courtesy of reliable Hollywood director Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games, I Am Legend), King’s somber, tightly-paced drama is finally set to make its theatrical debut. Like the titular Long Walk, the film itself is intense and visceral in a way that is difficult to verbalize. I finished reading the (quite excellent) novel about four minutes before the screening began, and my worries of instant mental comparison evaporated as soon as the opening title noisily smashed its way on-screen. All doubt was gone.

Cooper Hoffman (Licorice Pizza) stars as Ray Garraty, one of this year’s entrants in the annual competition known only as “the Long Walk,” which pits 50 young men against each other in a test of both mind and body. Hoffman stars alongside David Jonsson (Alien: Romulus), Garrett Wareing (Boychoir), Charlie Plummer (All the Money in the World), Ben Wang (Karate Kid: Legends), Roman Griffin Davis (Jojo Rabbit), and many more. It’s a who’s-who of the new generation of rising male stars, and as someone who has enjoyed each of them individually for the past few years of their work, it’s delightful to see them all together. Their chemistry is tangible (especially between Hoffman and Jonsson), and they all function very well in scenes with lots of conflicting character voices, creating a grounded and palpable rapport that makes saying goodbye to any one of them extremely difficult.

The rules of the Long Walk are simple: everyone must walk until only one of them is left. If you lag below three miles per hour and use all three of your warnings, you get your “ticket,” and both your time in the Walk and your life are at an end. Mark Hamill co-stars as the Major, the autocratic leader of the Long Walk, and plays the character’s unyielding patriotism as sinister and uncomfortable, and even though the source material is several decades old, he can’t help but remind you of some very real figures in our very real world of today.

JT Mollner’s script is economical, streamlining what I had considered to be a marginally unadaptable story into an appropriately upsetting torrent of sadness and gloom. I really felt like I was along on this journey alongside some of our best young working actors, and that’s the film’s biggest victory: a sense of camaraderie and shared empathy, through the good and the bad, that we feel just as much as the characters do. We come to understand that, by premise alone, death for all but one of these boys is inevitable. The question becomes…how will we get there?

In more ways than one, it makes sense that Francis Lawrence directed this. He is known to make films that are either a) set in a dismal, dystopian American future, b) concerned with sympathetic characters surviving the worst life can throw at them, or c) violent depictions of how far we can push ourselves. Though I wish The Long Walk didn’t have as much CGI gore (the suggested violence is always more effective than the in-your-face stuff), the movie does happen to tackle all three of his strong suits with finesse and cinematic style. If you can handle framed upper bodies bobbing up and down during their unending Walk for upwards of 90% of the runtime, you’ll be just fine.

I feel I must once again impress just how remarkably sad, sickening, and structurally unique The Long Walk is. It’s about friendship and love, kindness and revolution, authoritarianism and purpose, and unsurprisingly, it’s a movie that feels very much at home in our current social and political climate. Walk, don’t run, to your local multiplex…if you have the stomach for it, the journey is well worth your time.

The Long Walk opens in theaters nationwide this Friday, September 12.