…although the novel was published in 1979.

Spoilers, but I’ll warn you before I get there. There’s actually so much I want to talk about there, but I’m hoping not to be too long-winded.

About 20% of Americans believe that they will be part of the 1% if they just keep on working hard enough. Mathematically that just doesn’t add up, but it does explain why 50 young men are willing to participate in this competition, even if they know that only one of them will survive the ordeal.

The competition is that we have fifty young men, one from each state, selected through a lottery. Whoever walks the longest, wins. There are no breaks and you can’t slow down under three miles or five kilometers (well, close enough) per hour. If you do, you will get a warning. You can have three warning. If you get a fourth, you will be shot. You can get rid of warning by walking an hour without getting another one. Also, if you try to leave the asphalt, you will be killed immediately.

Of course, the walk is an absurd idea. It reminded me of Battle Royale, in which a bunch of kids are brought together to teach each other a lesson of some kind by killing each other until only one of them is alive. In the movie, the explanation for the Walk is that it will reignite the work ethic of the whole country. Why? It doesn’t matter, because the real reason is that they want to show the country that they can do whatever they want to us. Well, I’m not in the US, but you know.

That’s the walk. Everyday drudgery. You just need to keep moving for some elusive goal until you die. And there’s a group of people who need things to be this way. However, there are positive messages here as well. Making friends and forming connections helps.

Along the way we learn quite a bit about some of the characters. There are two I found very compelling, but I’ll get to them in the spoilers.

The guards around them are just shadows. With the exception of the Major, who is running the show, we never learn anything about them. Mostly we don’t even see their faces, although we do see that there’s a couple of women there, so at least women still have that opportunity in this world.

Here’s an interesting tidbit: In the US, the market share for horror in the theatrical market is higher than it has been in the 30 years I was able to find stats for. It might have been larger when The Exorcist or The Jaws was released, but otherwise I think this is unprecedented. Not only is it bigger, but it’s much bigger. Of course, I can’t know whether this holds (as there will be big non-horror releases around Christmas), but it’s 16.58% right now, the previous record was 12.91% back in 2021. During the last 30 years, it has been under 3% on multiple years. The share has been growing, not steadily, but the line is going up.

And I can see why. While I don’t have any interest in the fourth Conjuring movie, we have Sinners, Weapons, Nosferatu, and so forth. Horror has just become the most interesting genre. It has shed this veneer of cheapness and low quality. It’s now seen as a real art form. Sure, that cheap shit still exists (and there’s a lot of it), but I also keep finding gems that never found much attention during their initial release (like Stop Motion, Oddity, Cuckoo and many even more obscure movies).

The Long Walk is an excellent addition to this new height for the genre.

But let’s get to the spoilers…

The most interesting character is Barkovitch or #5. He’s played by Charlie Plummer and it took me a while to realize where I knew him from, but he was in two very different, but excellent horror movies previously: The Clovehitch Killer and Spontaneous. He is set up as a kind of asshole. While everyone else just plans on walking and outlasting the others, he has a plan: He wants to harass the others into making mistakes and thus getting killed.

However, he manages to do this and it crushed him. His plan works, but he can’t live with himself. He starts to lose his mind and while he still kind of tries his shenanigans, eventually he just stops walking, because he can’t live with himself anymore. That’s an interesting arc. Also, it is interesting that there’s only one character who approaches the game in this way. Some others have their strategies as well, but they are more about minding their own business and keeping their head down, but Barkovitch makes himself the villain early only to learn that he couldn’t stand being in that role.

Another great character is DeVries or #23. While he seems initially, like a second or two, apprehensive about making friends, eventually he is the backbone of the group. He is the one who tries to keep everyone going and is always there for everyone, saving multiple lives along the way, which of course is all for nothing in the end, but at the same time, if this is a metaphor for life, every step is a win. None of us want to let go even if we know tomorrow will be the same drudge. That might not be state of things we want, but if there’s nothing better, we will accept it.

Eventually DeVries wins. This has been set up quite obviously, but it still hits nicely and the way they do the climax does make a pretty good attempt at hiding this. So, his prize is a shit ton of money and a wish, so he asks for what his friend told him in confidence he would wish for: a weapon. He uses, like his friend would have, the weapon to kill the Major immediately.

However, the final shot is DeVries just walking again. None of this really solved anything for him. The struggle continues. He stated during the walk that he wanted to win so that he could do good with the money, when many of the others just wanted themselves out of poverty. He destroyed this opportunity, but he did manage to kill an important symbol of their oppression.

So, Charlie Kirk was killed just two days ago as of this writing. He was a symbol. Did his death solve anything? Although, it would appear that the murderer wasn’t that far from Kirk from an ideological point of view. At the same time, the people I find my personal politics most aligned with (meaning pretty radical left and I would like to note that the Democratic party in the US is a right-wing party) are saying (and I agree) that you can hate the act of the assassination without putting the victim on a pedestal.

In the end, the Major’s murder solves nothing. The real consequence was probably that DeVries was just gunned down immediately. Yet, resistance is important and in general non-violent does work better.

For example, in Finland in 1905, there was a movement of passive resistance against drafts for the Russo-Japanese war (Finland being part of Russia at the time). This actually led to the formation of Finnish parliament and later to Finnish independence. On the other hand, Gandhi isn’t as revered as the savior of India in India itself, where they also acknowledge the revolutionaries who took on the British with violence.

It’s complicated and it’s understandable that our feelings regarding this are complicated as well.