Movie Details
| Title: | The Long Walk | |
| Director: | Francis Lawrence | |
| Year: | 2025 | |
| Genre: | Dark Future | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 12.20.25 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (4)
- Constantine
- The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
- The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
- I Am Legend
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 12.20.25 | Internet | It's Richard Bachman night tonight starting off with this one with Cooper Hoffman walking and Mark Hammill as The Major. I first read the collected "Bachman books" in high school and found them pretty incendiary. The paperback contained four short novels, three of which I loved: Rage, a story about a school shooting, then a novel and outrageous concept; The Long Walk; Roadwork, about a guy... I dunno, upset about road construction so he blows it up? (can you tell this was the one I didn't love?); and finally The Running Man. I believe Rage is no longer part of this collection as King let it go out of print after school shootings became fucking normalized but until now I think the only Bachman story to get a film adaptation was Running Man. Both stories are dystopian tales of brutal game shows that deal in human suffering, but in slightly different ways. As a teenager I ate them both up. I'd seen the Schwarzenegger Running Man many times but it different from the book in major ways (more about that later), but I figured nobody made a Long Walk moving because it was just kids walking... until they didn't. Plus I remember it having a bleak-ass ending, which I think this movie changed but I get why. Mostly I remember really liking how you learn about the world in bits and bobs through the telling of the story without a ton of exposition. Like there's a totalitarian regime with secret police and stuff. Again, if you put yourself in a world pre-battle royale and hunger games and squid game, this concept is much more novel and interesting. I do remember the book's ending being much more random, like one of the kids dies of a heart attack or something? and the main character goes insane and keeps walking even after he wins. I think for the most part they made smart adaptation choices here. The new ending is much more of a movie ending and I'm not bowled over by it but I understand you can't ask an audience to sit through this whole movie and not give them some kind of narrative closure. Many of King's book endings are heavily criticized, often fairly I think. This movie includes all the good stuff in the beginning and middle so the ending doesn't matter so much. One sequence, where they're walking through the first night and Cooper Hoffman's on his third warning and you see a sign saying something like "steep ass hill, kiss your ass goodbye" and he's walking up this hill with a soldier walking right next to him pointing a gun at his head waiting for him to slow down just one more time was super intense. And just in general, putting yourself in their shoes and wondering how you'd fare... any little thing like a rock in your shoe or having to shit or tripping and twisting your ankle. Boom, get your ticket. Brutal. I do remember the tv show aspect being much greater in the book, and I remember at the end they walk into a city for the first time and there are massive lights and crowds and stuff. I'm guessing that aspect of the story was so scaled back due to budget and perhaps also maybe knowing Running Man was being developed at the same time? With just a few shots and references to the armored vehicles keeping pace with them having cameras, it often feels more like it's just a weird exercise that these guys are doing. They do talk about the money and wish that the winner gets and they explain the lack of crowds away with some dialogue but I think the show aspect goes a ways to help you swallow the crazy main conceit of being forced to walk or die. So... I thought this was good. It made me wonder if I went back and read these stories again if I'd still love them or not but I do have fond memories and this movie didn't betray them. It's necessarily gory when it needs to be to drive home the horror of the situation and while you may figure Cooper Hoffman makes it till the end of the movie, you come to root for some characters and wonder what's gonna get all the clearly secondary characters until it's just the main ones left. It feels a bit like a slasher in that way except they're just walking. I'm... not sure I buy Cooper Hoffman being 170 pounds. He spends the whole movie walking next to a super built dude showing off his biceps. I'm not trying to shame anyone here, they even have a line about them being heavier than everyone else, but... 170? And lastly, I don't know how fast 3 miles per hour actually is (yes, I read in the trivia that the book was 4), but I believed they were all really walking for a long ass time. Some guys looked a little fresh in a few takes but many of those takes were quite long and they were walking and delivering dialogue and everything else. I find it difficult to walk to the mailbox without pulling my pants up and rearranging my socks that get rotated due to my gait in these slippers so i feel the extra fabric between my toes and it just... does not feel right. So good job, everyone. |
