The Long Walk Review (Film, 2025)
content warning: blood, gore, gun violence, foul language, smoking, grieving, mental wellness, animal death
The Long Walk is the feel-bad film of 2025. That's a compliment. If I left an adaptation of Stephen King's The Long Walk with a skip in my step and a smile on my face, it would be an utter failure on the creators' part.
The Long Walk is a dystopian death game set in an undisclosed, alternate timeline version of America. 50 young men, one from each state, are recruited from a rigorous application process to compete in The Long Walk. The must walk at three miles per hour until only one person is left standing. The rest "get their ticket"--a euphemism for execution. There is no escape. There is no timeout. There is no mercy. Walk or die. The winner gets unimaginable wealth and one wish, which is perhaps the only way to advance in an alternate reality America where the country was devastated by World War II and left in financial ruin.
When I tell you this Stephen King by way of Richard Bachman novel has haunted me for decades, I'm not exaggerating. I found the book in an anthology of Bachman novels when I was a teenager (that rare, out-of-print by choice collection also featuring Rage) and have lived with the memory of that ending for over 20 years. I'm admittedly drawn to the dystopian deadly games genre, but I can tell you with utter certainty that The Long Walk is the most upsetting.
The film shifts around a lot of details and (mercifully) reduces the contestants from 100 teenagers (13-18 in the novel) to 50 young adults (18 year olds). That's still a whole lot of lives ended before they ever reach their prime, taken down by the barrel of a carbine operated by a member of the military.
The General, played to horrifying perfection by a never-better Mark Hamill, is the face of The Long Walk. He hypes the young men up, telling them how they are competing for the ultimate prize and sacrificing themselves for the greater good. He plays on their egos, telling them how huge they are, how strong they are, how powerful they are to compete at all. The young men eat it up until the first teen gets their ticket. Then we all get to see what appears to be a young child crying as his head is split, with military precision, into shrapnel.
It has been widely reported that Stephen King demanded two things in the adaptation. First, he wanted to approve casting. Second, he wanted the camera to show the contestants die. There is no hiding from the violence the military industrial complex forces on these young men. They can walk or they can die, and only one of them doesn't meet his end by firing squad.
The anti-war metaphor is clear, but the gun violence against teenagers takes on another meaning in our post-Columbine America. The Long Walk forces the audience to confront the true horror of gun violence against our most vulnerable population: our youth. It eliminates the bad guy vs good guy argument. It eliminates the trained professional argument. It even eliminates the self-defense argument.
The Long Walk is not a fair fight. If the boys fight back, they die; if they don't fight back, they die; if they have to tie their shoe and don't move quickly enough, they die; if they break an ankle because another contestant's corpse gets shoved into them in the rain, they die. Any illusion of glory or honor is thrown out the window when a teenager gets gunned down for using the bathroom.
The Long Walk is about the best adaptation I could imagine of this novel, which also means that it's an incredibly hard film to watch. The brief moments of levity--the contestants becoming friends, or singing a song, or sharing memories--only makes their inevitable deaths worse. No one wins The Long Walk, not really, even if someone will walk away with the cash prize and a wish. The entire contest is a lie, an elaborate carrot dangled in front of the desperate masses that convinces half of the population to willingly sign up for their ticket on the two percent chance that they don't die before 49 other teenagers do. This is a story told exceptionally well, adapted beautifully to work in a visual medium, that has only grown in relevance since King initially penned it around 1967.
The Long Walk is playing in theaters.