Last Updated on September 4, 2025

I went through a big Stephen King phase in my teens. The Stand was a life changing read for me, one of those books that just alters your brain chemistry. Other favourites at the time included Misery, The Mist, and The Jaunt (the latter two both part of Skeleton Crew, a short story collection which really fucked me up for a while). Time passed and I moved on to other things. But my love affair with King briefly rekindled in my early twenties, with reads of It, The Dark Tower, and The Running Man, first published under the nom de plume Richard Bachman. I mention the latter specifically because in many ways it’s very similar to The Long Walk. Both involve post-economic crash dystopian USAs; both involve men voluntarily signing up for deadly gameshows; and both involve constant movement.

But The Long Walk is not The Running Man, so let’s talk about the former, not the latter.

It goes something like this.

America has gone to shit, and a mysterious despot known as The Major (Mark Hammil) now figuratively and literally runs the show. The show in question is the titular Long Walk, a competition in which fifty-odd men—well, walk, across a desolate, but beautiful, rural USA. There’s no finish line. Keeping pace is a handful of armoured cars full of fascists with assault rifles and one enormous howitzer for some reason.

There are three rules:

You must walk at or above 3 miles an hour constantly;If you drop below 3mph, you get three ten-second warnings to make it back to pace; andEvery hour you keep pace, one warning is erased from your record.

If you fall behind for thirty seconds, you get “your ticket”—i.e. shot. Last man standing gets untold wealth and one wish (this is important!).

Of the fifty men who volunteer, the story unsurprisingly focuses on a handful. The main character is Raymond Garraty, played with decidedly chequered acting ability by Cooper Hoffman, very capably supported (read: undeniably overshadowed) by British actor David Jonsson playing Peter McVries (the only criticism that can be levelled at Jonsson is that his occasionally hammy South-USA drawl is at times unintelligible).

Garraty and Hoffman’s friendship forms the thematic and emotional core of the movie. As they walk for—eventually, hundreds—of miles through burning heat, freezing rain, blazing arguments, and the violent elimination of their fellow contestants, they form a profound and intimate fraternal bond, made all the more unlikely by the fact that they are direct competitors.

A movie like The Long Walk is an interesting concept. Unlike, say, The Stand, which is a plot-heavy apocalyptic narrative you simply sit back and marvel at, The Long Walk is constantly asking you the question ‘what would you do in this situation?’

Well the first thing I would do is not sign up for it.

One of the most surprising things I learnt about The Long Walk was that participating in it is entirely voluntarily. The script has Garraty try to explain/handwave this, by arguing that the dystopian system in which they all exist means it’s voluntary only in name (it’s the system, man! It’s the corporate fat cats, man!); but even with this ham-fisted sociopolitical spiel, the movie tells us that Garraty was entirely free to abandon the whole thing up to a day beforehand.

I am a professional writer, and so I do really genuinely appreciate the concept of suspension of disbelief (promise!) and I’m prepared to accept all sorts of things in the name of the Rule of Cool. But it feels to me like it wouldn’t have been much of a stretch to have made the Long Walk mandatory, like the frickin’ Hunger Games. It really is quite difficult to understand the motivation to sign up for something with a 49/50 chance of violent death, even if you are living in a dystopia, and even if you get a bajillion dollars as the winner. Statistically you’re just committing suicide.

(And yes, Garraty has his own special emotional reason which I can’t spoil, but even that isn’t enough to penetrate this reviewer’s grey matter and stick).

The men who participate do so initially, gleefully, backslapping and trading jokes and stories, and then are shocked and dismayed when the first of them gets shot. Well what did they expect???

Even knowing what it was they were signing up for, some of these guys had the survival instincts of a wet cardboard box. Being shot in the face with an assault rifle—and the movie delights in showing you these gory cranial explosions in very high definition—is, arguably, one of the worst things that can happen to you. Yet as you watch men yield to cramp, trips and spills, a hill—a hill!—and Chekhov’s howitzer, the temptation to shout at the screen becomes overwhelming. I suppose having 49 of them simply drop down from sheer exhaustion and lack of sleep would have been a more boring movie.

(To be fair to the movie, one of the characters does walk for about 10 miles with a disgustingly 90-degree-broken ankle, so terrified of death is he. That is the kind of desperation that felt much closer to the mark).

Anyway, this feels like nitpicking. “You don’t get it Swan,” refined enjoyers of the book shout at me through the internet. “It’s not about that. The Long Walk is really an exploration and celebration of male friendship and brotherhood, the unbreakable bonds we form in extreme situations, and ultimately the triumph of altruism, compassion, self-sacrifice and espirit de corps that define the best humanity has to offer—and that’s a good thing.”

“Yes, but the howitzer—” I shout back, but you cut me off: “We need more of that in the modern world. We need movies that show young men just unashamedly enjoying the ritual of bonding! Sure, at times this is grating and annoying; but at others, especially towards the end of the movie, its actually very poignant!”

“Certainly,” I shout, sweating, “but they shouldn’t have signed up for it knowing they would die!”

“You’re missing the point!” You rejoin. “Even the character you are very obviously supposed to hate—and do, because he’s very hateable—epiphanises: “my dad always said everyone’s got to have a few buddies”. Friendship, kinship, sharing experiences good and bad, defines us as people! As McVries says in the movie, better to be friends even if it’s just for a couple of hours!”

“Aha!” I shout. I play my ace. “Anthony O’Connor of FilmInk told me after the ending in the book was really good and this ending is ridiculous.”

You thrash about for a counterargument like a drowning man searching for a life preserver. But there’s nothing. Even you, enjoyer of the beautifully explored themes of the novel, cannot deny that the movie’s ending is, in a word, stupid.

“Whatever,” you mutter, closing the laptop.

And I, the winner of the internet argument, reach for my old, dogeared copy of The Stand, and begin to read.

The Long Walk is out Thursday 11 September.

The post The Long Walk explores bonds forged in extremity and then trips over the finish line appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.