By Dolores Quintana
The Long Walk is a heartbreaker. A walk towards mortality, as each character realizes that they’re going to die. But it’s really about the humanity in each of us, at a moment in time when we need it. Is the imperative walk or die, or that human beings are there for each other?
This is Francis Lawrence’s best film by miles, and he’s made some good ones. Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson aced it, but the whole cast was great. The movie is 100% ruthless and beautifully empathetic at the same time. JT Mollner’s script was note-perfect. One of the most amazing feats the film pulls off is that it puts you right in the middle of the crowd of young men. You’re not watching passively, but moving with the group.
This film has my highest recommendation.I’ve seen it three times and I’ll definitely watch it again. You can buy tickets here.
The cast includes Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Ben Wang, Roman Griffin Davis, Jordan Gonzalez, Joshua Odjick, Josh Hamilton, Judy Greer, and Mark Hamill. All are doing superlative work, including Hamill, who never shows his eyes. You can feel his menace and his one moment of sincerity through his voice, since he can’t use his face.
Hoffman and Jonsson are wonderfully paired; they are two kindred spirits who lived different lives that were both painful in their own ways. Every character has their moment, and the kindness and the cruelty visited upon them and that they inflict on each other, only adds to their characterization.
This is the synopsis: rom the highly anticipated adaptation of master storyteller Stephen King’s first-written novel, and Francis Lawrence, the visionary director of The Hunger Games franchise films (Catching Fire, Mockingjay – Pts. 1 & 2, and The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes), comes The Long Walk, an intense, chilling, and emotional thriller that challenges audiences to confront a haunting question: how far could you go?
You can watch the trailer here:
You see on the actors’ faces the slowly dawning horror of the reality of each one of their deaths, the fascist dictator’s power trip that uses the blood, viscera, and brain matter of young men to cement his hold around your neck. The Major’s smug, tight-lipped smile says, I can do this to you any time I want, and that is the true meaning of a fascist leader’s flexing of their totalitarian power. You are not safe, you will never be safe, unless you bow down to me.
That beautiful empathy is in every ounce of the film, from Lawrence’s direction to Mollner’s writing, but it is especially in the faces of the actors chosen to portray the film’s characters. You see such openness and hope in so many of their faces that it is painful every time the carbine barks. When a mother cries out to her son. When the angry, lonely, and fearful strike out at others and do damage.
It all means something.
When leaders pull these kinds of stunts, it is a flexing of their power. We’re witnessing something like it right now. As masked men kidnap people off the streets and make them disappear, loading them into prisons to be starved, tortured, and humiliated. You know what I’m talking about.
If you’re lucky, if you’re still human, their terrified screams pleading for help will ring in your ears for the rest of your life. Life has its price, after all. For all of the joy and love you feel, we are all going to die, and we all feel the pain visited on ourselves, and if we’re lucky, on others.
That’s what being human is all about, and that is what the film ultimately has on its mind. Are we out for ourselves, or are we one human race? There’s a scene in Dune that was adapted to both films. It is a very cinematic sequence, but it is presented as a test of endurance of pain, which it is on one level.
What is it actually? It’s a test of humanity. Frank Herbert’s Dune says, You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap. There’s an animal kind of trick. a human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.”
Do you have control of your fear, or does the fear control you? Are you able to reach out to others, or do you only think of yourself?
Tyrants may have excuses for why they do these things, but in the end, it’s for only one reason. They are saying I can do this, and no one will stop me. You will enthusiastically join in on your destruction or stand by and obediently watch. When no one opposes them, they say without saying it: I am the all-powerful. I am the Almighty. I am your God.
It’s all a load of patriotic hogwash to cover up their own insecure self-deification. They need that adulation, whatever form it may take. To the Major, this means that 50 young men will sign up to die for him, and all he has to do is dangle money and a wish in front of them to get them to do it. They will willingly commit suicide via soldier and they don’t realize it until it is far too late.
When The Long Walkers, the few that are left, show signs of defiance, the Major cheers them on. Why? Because he knows he’s killing the right ones, and that’s what this contest is, it’s to capture and rid himself of the brave. A yearly cull of the potential opposition.
In the film, every degradation of the human spirit, whether it happens to you or that you witness it, is visited upon The Long Walkers and the audience. The terror is on display and being broadcast live. The film doesn’t look away from it, and it’s truly horrifying.
In a time where men with guns are grabbing people off the street as they scream and beg for mercy, The Long Walk hits in a different way than it would in a different time period. Not all of them, though.
While Stephen King was inspired to write it about the Vietnam War, it fits our current time much too well. When confronted by evil, what will you do?
The Long Walk is one of the greatest adaptations of a Stephen King book ever made. I’d rate it as top five among the stellar works that have already been adapted from his work. Filled with delicate gentleness, horrific brutality, and the rawest rage, it is a magnificent portrait of the best and worst of our species.
What we are capable of and what we all too often settle for out of cowardice and greed. The Long Walk is the sublime music of our souls versus the jingoistic cacophony of the void.
