Are you betting against The Karate Kid?! I would not bet against The Karate Kid. And thus, The Long Walk begins, collecting a lottery-“winning” volunteer from every state. (Only fifty, as usual, Puerto Rico and DC get the shaft.) There is a minimum speed. There are no rests. There is no finish line. And the end only happens when all the other walkers are dead. The participants are all boys. Not girls. Not men. Boys. [Not exactly a hit with the Bechdel club] Boys old enough to be new soldiers, and no older. And at the end there will be one winner and 49 corpses.
Is that modern horror enough for you?
If you bet on the macabre, our favorite in Ray Garraty #47 (Cooper Hoffman). We have two reasons for liking him: the first is he is the only one among them who doesn’t care about the prize winnings; he has another agenda in mind. The second is that the camera never really strays from him. If you kill him, the camera has to find somebody else. I’m not sure it’s prepared to do that.
Ray makes several companions among his rivals. In fact, the best part of this film is the camaraderie among the doomed. None of these boys will have a living friend when this arch concludes, and most of them will be dead, and, yet, Ray befriends Pete #23 (David Jonsson), Hank #46 (Ben Wang), and Art #6 (Tut Nyuot). It’s messed up, and yet, there’s a sweet acceptance in knowing how we go to our deaths matters. And being civil always matters. It matters especially when Pete forces a drowsy Ray to slog his way up a steep incline on the night of Day #1.
The deal is all walkers are monitored. They had to stay above 3 MPH at all times. It’s not a fast pace, but the lack of rest takes care of whatever the pace lacks. Any walker going below 3 MPH gets a warning. The fourth warning is death. The walk is paced by armed soldiers ready to kill and a tank or two. While warnings are cumulative, a warning can be “erased” with a full hour of steady walking. Early on, a contestant games the system by seeing what it takes to get a warning. Difficulties come when the fates conspire: illness will not spare you, nor will faulty footwear, nor a fiery temper. The first walker is killed when his attempts to retaliate against a troll go awry. Part of the game is keeping a level head. That’s why it is good to have friends. Are there villains? Of course there are villains. Even in a contest where the only oppressor is society.
There is something very American about taking the Bataan Death March and making it into a game show. I tell you where this film misses the boat is if it truly wanted to comment on the present state of American fascism, it would have televised the event coast-to-coast and -seeing as it is government sponsored- had Trump try to profit from it. My guess would be constant billboards along the way advertising his new crypto bullshit.
The real question the film presents is “How far are we from this particular dystopia?” I want to say we are still a ways away from The Long Walk in real life. For one thing, we still have a distaste for televised murder – although I could easily view the world in which MAGA thinks there’s nothing wrong with it. We are already there; we 
just haven’t gotten to the part where Trump wants to put his evil on TV in real time. But we also don’t live in an America, yet, where every coming-of-age boy would volunteer. We talking about a spectacle which has a 98% death rate and the lone survivor will almost certainly have some form of PTSD, and, yet, The Long Walk takes applications from “everybody you know.”
The Long Walk is a fascinating and tense look at dystopia. I’m tempted to go re-read the Stephen King novella right now. How long ago did King “predict” this? Did he foresee and America where The Long Walk might be a thing? The film itself is on par with the first Hunger Games. While life is cheap, that doesn’t mean lives have to be cheap. The treadmill of death will always make for riveting drama, but the film sells itself not a death, but on life. It is the smiles and surprising displays of support that make The Long Walk a gem, not the mortality rate. And I would love to know how a non-fictionalized version of this contest would play for real.
There once was a boy named Ray
Whose father was taken away
His idea to redeem
Was bizarre, it would seem
It required walking all night and all day
Rated R, 108 Minutes
Director: Francis Lawrence
Writer: JT Mollner, Stephen King
Genre: You have to be *this* dystopian …
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: The people who see parallels in our current fucked up country
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: “Does this pass the Bechdel test?”
