I suppose we owe some respect to the new film adaptation of The Long Walk. Based on one of the earliest novels by Stephen King, this sort of ancestor to The Hunger Games sees a group of boys, living in an authoritarian society willingly entering an annual state-sponsored competition in which they all embark on a nationwide walk, all maintaining a consistent walking pace. If they fall below that, they get a bullet to the cranium. Last boy walking wins.
Full credit, there aren't a lot of studio films that stitch together a solid piece of entertainment with such basic materials. There's minimal computer-generation and only a handful of actors, none of whom are really household names. (The obvious exception being Mark Hamill.) Much of the film is portrayed in relaxed long-takes that really let the actors' charisma shine. This movie proves that creative film language can be enough to turn a walk down the country road into a full-on warzone.
But the movie has a system error that penalizes the entire experience--one which was, in fairness, also inherent in the Stephen King (or, you'd prefer, Richard Bachman) book.
I seem to recall there was some rule in the book about the walkers not being allowed to interfere with one another, but that doesn't really explain why they would ever try to assist one another along the way. They come into this competition knowing that only one of these guys is going to make it out alive, but they still cheer each other on, even trying to carry them through a charlie horse, like somehow they're all going to make it back to grandma's after this is over. The book never really gave a satisfying answer to that either, but I was kind of hoping that the movie would. We got some internal lampshading, but that's about it. One of the characters says at one point, "A short friendship is better than no friendship."
Perhaps it's an artistic choice to not have the boys try to find covert ways to sabotage one another, but in imagining that the greater majority of these boys are going to be their brother's keeper from the start, well ... the story flies in the face of one of the first things we know about capitalism under totalitarianism. It turns people into self-serving monsters. Maybe not always right away, but when you have to feed your brother to the grinder in order to stay afloat, a lot of otherwise good people will trip the competition so they won't have to get their own ticket punched.
Most other artistic study of this kind of thing (Squid Game, The Hunger Games, etc.) catch onto this. The people who abstain from this sort of systemic cruelty wind up becoming outliers, and occasionally martyrs. But none of the boys on this death walk are really propping the other kids along imagining that they are going to dismantle this parade of carnage--another thing those heroes of other comparable works try to do. And so it becomes this unacknowledged elephant in the road walking alongside these boys throughout the whole film.
This is the kind of movie that can still easily be hailed as bold or timely because the bad guy does a good Donald Trump impression, but for how viciously it portrays the ravages of the system, for how graphically pieces of the boys' face burst apart in front of our eyes, the movie is always very sheepish when it comes to the most vicious truth about what awaits a nation that falls under tyranny.
(I will in passing also mention this film's ending, which deviates from the book. This ending which, and there's no way the filmmakers could have possibly anticipated this, ends up feeling rather gauche, even triggering, in the wake of specific political recencies. Again, I can't really fault director Francis Lawrence, but I thought it bore some mention just the same.)
Am I radical for submitting that I genuinely liked last year's Salem's Lot adaptation much better than this?
--The Professor
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