Knee-jerk review: "The Long Walk"

1. Yeah, it's pretty bleak.  
2. And very gory.  The filmmakers certainly don't shy away from the violent, shocking brutality of gunfire.  Seems a little gratuitous maybe.  Then again, too many movies make gunfights unrealistically bloodless and tidy.  
3. We were in a serious Stephen King phase back in middle school and high school.  We read everything, including terrible books like The Tommyknockers, which King famously wrote while high on painkillers.  So we read The Long Walk probably in... 8th grade?  (For the record, The Shining and It remain two of the scariest books we've ever read.)
4. Mark Hamill makes a pretty good villain.  He's completely unrecognizable here.
5. The book was written in the late 1960s and is very clearly a Vietnam War allegory: young men enter a hopeless situation and die horrible deaths one by one, forging strong friendships and sharing personal secrets along the way.  The brotherhood stuff here is very powerful.  Too bad it's forged in such a terrible, grim fire.
6. Stories like this clearly inspired The Hunger Games.  Aside from the first movie, all of the Hunger Games sequels were directed by Francis Lawrence, who's also the director here.  One could argue he's making a companion movie.  While The Hunger Games had an over-the-top, exaggerated vibe - it may be set on Earth, but no one would mistake Panem for our America - The Long Walk has a drab, gritty, urgent feel to it.  This is what our world could become.  If The Hunger Games is a fairy tale, The Long Walk is a "60 Minutes" story.
7. There's really no way to end a film like this well.  Just about everyone is going to be dead before the final fade out.  But how it all plays out was particularly disappointing to us.  One character makes a choice that goes against everything he's been arguing for 90 minutes.  The Long Walk, it seems, broke him.  We get it, but we don't have to like it.
8. "Warning!"
9. Actors Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson, the two main characters, are fantastic together.  There's an interesting dynamic that emerges as they debate vengenace and hate versus love and forgiveness.  It practically turns religious.
10. Some of the flashbacks involving secret police, summary judgments, and the suppression of speech feel uncomfortably timely.  This sort of cultural synergy is always fascinating to us because those scenes were surely shot at least a year ago.  The zeitgeist always finds its way into art whether we know it's happening at the time or not.
11. It is good?  Absolutely.  Is it fun?  Not especially.

Tweet