The Long Walk 4K 2025

One of the most promising films of the year was recently released—the adaptation of Stephen King's dystopian novel The Long Walk, directed by Francis Lawrence (The Hunger Games, Constantine). And this film turned out to be a very disappointing spectacle.

The plot of The Long Walk is as simple as possible: in a cruel totalitarian world, young people get the chance once a year to win a huge sum of money and have any wish granted. To do this, they just need to walk at a speed of 5 km per hour until only one person remains. There is no finish line, you can't stop, and if you get three warnings in a row, it's game over.

Given the success of the dystopian film The Hunger Games, which has a similar basic concept, it's no surprise that the producers invited Francis Lawrence to direct The Long Walk. However, the director was hardly able to breathe life into this story. The film's budget is quite modest—$20 million. And this is clearly evident—The Long Walk feels like a movie shot in a couple of cheap sets, on a deserted road and in a pavilion with the lights turned off.

Since nothing much happens in The Long Walk except endless walking and the killing of tired contestants, the main value of the story should have been the characters themselves. Their personalities, their biographies, and, of course, their conversations. But there is nothing interesting about these walking guys. They are a standard King's set of characters exchanging phrases that we seem to have already heard in It, Stay with Me, The Mist, and his other works.

Perhaps it is silly to complain that the characters of a particular author have traits in common with other characters by that author. But still... it's getting tiresome...
Personally, I did not feel sympathy for any of the characters in The Long Walk.

Moreover, the longer they walked and the more they suffered, the more absurd their story and their world seemed. At some point, they begin to talk about wanting to fix the world order, but the viewer has absolutely no idea what their reality is. We know that such competitions take place every year, but the characters seem to have fallen from the moon and know little about what awaits them. And in general, the voluntary nature of the characters' participation in The Long Walk turns them into a bunch of extremely stupid dreamers with suicidal tendencies.

In addition, Francis Lawrence did not seem particularly concerned with making The Long Walk unpredictable and intriguing. Those who make it to the final are obvious very quickly—they walk too briskly compared to the others. The heroes' walk lasts more than one day, but the main characters do not get very tired or exhausted. At least outwardly, this is not very apparent. Who will go mad, who will suffer defeat at the hands of their own body, and who will try to show aggression - it's all very predictable. Even the final scenes were probably predicted by most viewers long before they saw them on screen.

In short, it is quite difficult to find value in The Long Walk. As a cruel dystopia, it failed to deliver, as it did not bother to show a dystopian world. As a story about the suffering of people forced to suffer for money, à la “They Shoot Horses, Don't They?”, it also failed to deliver, as the main characters set off on their journey with other motives. Visually, the film is rather weak. The semantic load is also minimal. Even the brutal horror promised in the trailer is not brought to life - the misleading trailer simply crammed in all the bloody episodes, which don't look so scary in the film itself.

Although, of course, it is far from a failed film. It's just a boring, standard film based on a not very successful and original work by Stephen King. Cooper Hoffman, David Johnson, Charlie Plummer, and other actors give excellent performances. Tired of directing, Francis Lawrence made a solid film, although he clearly didn't put a drop of soul into it.