In a recent piece in which I drool over the potential of a (hopefully legit!) TV adaptation of The Dark Tower, I start out by talking about how listening to The Long Walk and The Running Man – early Stephen King novels written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman – helped to jumpstart my passion for audiobooks.
Revisiting those two books specifically was also great timing as it led to my catching the recent film adaptations of both with the books freshly in my mind.
While The Running Man was competently made but ultimately forgettable, The Long Walk, directed by Francis Lawrence, turned out to be a considerably more interesting affair.
One of the things I admire most about The Long Walk is that it remains true to the novel’s downbeat, semi-dystopian vibes. One could even imagine the United States as depicted in The Long Walk to be an economically devastated, (even more) Trumpian police state.
And if that’s not scary enough as a starting point, then it should be.
Even though the novel was published in 1979, the 2025 film feels more scarily realistic in terms of its overall setting than the recently heralded Civil War, from Alex Garland.
Much like The Running Man novel (dump any relation to its filmic brethren here), it touches on something within the American psyche – capitalism turned ugly, voyeurism, greed, an ugly thirst for blood on a societal level that doesn’t get discussed very often.
And into that mix are thrown a bunch of largely innocent and naive young men literally walking for their lives.
Head’s up: spoilers lurk below.
Outstanding casting and performances are one of the core reasons why The Long Walk the movie works as well as it does.
The core relationship that the movie focuses on is between two Long Walk participants: Cooper Hoffman as Raymond Garraty and David Jonsson as Peter McVries. Now, a slight gripe I have with the pair is that they’re somewhat “aged up” versus the teens featured in the novel, but really I can’t complain here as the two are outstanding actors and have great on-screen chemistry as two fast friends literally paired on a walk in hell.
Hoffman, the son of the deceased legend Philip Seymour Hoffman, is great in the otherwise uneven Licorice Pizza from director Paul Thomas Anderson, while Jonsson stands out among a stacked cast during the first few seasons of HBO’s Industry. Both have real screen presence and are in that elite tier where I’m simply interested in the work they’re doing generally.
The movie version does a few smart things that improve upon the source material, impressive stuff indeed when you consider the author’s pedigree. The biggest thing is that the characters wear watches that let them know their walking speed. This both gives us a visual clue as to the pace and strategy (read = go below a certain speed enough times and you get machine gunned in the head) while also making sense within the context an already exceptionally cruel contest that its participants voluntarily opt into joining.
Mark Hamill, an inspired choice as the gruff and stoic Major who oversees the contest, also helpfully provides context early on for why The Long Walk would be the obsession for what appears to be a fascist police state (too close to home, kids? Trust me, I get it!).
However, that ties to one of my biggest gripes with the movie: we don’t get the mass crowds cheering and jeering the walkers that tie to the atmosphere of the novel’s second half. I’m not sure if this decision was made for budgetary or story reasons, but you get little sense that the nation is actually obsessed with the race.
Without giving too much away, there are also major changes in the movie with regard to both Ray Garraty’s motivation for being in the race in addition to who the eventual winner and sole survivor is. I was mostly okay with how this was handled.
Other changes make sense in a movie context: the minimum walking speed is lowered from four miles per hour to three, and the overall walking competitors dropped from 100 to 50.
In more than one case, book characters are “combined” in the movie, which mostly makes sense. I do feel the movie version of Billie Stebbins (Garrett Wareing) was a bit of a miss. In the book, he’s strangely wise and enigmatic early on before we learn of his true motivations.
One open question for me carried across book and movie: even with most of the walkers coming from presumably poor homes, you’d think there would at least be some attempt at obtaining the best possible sneakers and athletic wear, let alone high end food and drinks for what will surely be a multiple day walk for the eventual (surviving) winner.
Perhaps the most puzzling thing of all in both book and movie is why these young men would enter a contest with such an incredibly high risk of dying – even in this dystopian context.
The fact that the question won’t leave me alone suggests the story is pressing on something uncomfortably real.