What would you do to escape poverty?
The Long Walk answers this question early on. The film takes place in a dystopian version of the United States struggling economically after a war. To help motivate production there is an annual contest in which 50 young men from each state compete to see who can walk the farthest for an unspecified cash prize and any wish they desire. The consequence of losing? Death.
This setup begs the question; how do you make a movie about walking engaging? The answer is the use of strong characters and dialogue. The film employs a large cast with about 10 characters as the main focus.
Each character has his own motivations and strategies for the walk.
The standout characters are Ray Garraty, played by Cooper Hoffman, and Peter Movries, played by David Johnson. The viewer spends the most time with these two characters and watch as they deal with the walk. Through their shared conversations we learn about the world and their respective paths that led them to this point.
Neither fully realize what they’ve got themselves into until the first person dies. You see the hopelessness wash across the characters’ faces and the attitudes of many change. One even saying he doesn’t believe he can win, but it’s too late to go back. As more and more people die the morale worsens and the inevitable truth of their likely demise weighs visibly on each walker.
The acting throughout the film is phenomenal. With masterful performances from Mark Hamill, Ben Wang, Cooper Hoffman, and more. The clear standout performance of the film, however, comes from David Johnson. The emotion put into his dialogue is a step above the rest and is strengthened by the physicality of his performance. There are many moments where the other characters are leading the scene but David steals the spotlight. The subtle shifts of his body and the stiffness he gets in tense situations despite presenting facially as calm give us a deeper peek into his characters’ mental state throughout the film that the others don’t have.
Despite the reality that only one can win, we see the characters desperately try to save each other and prolong the relationships they’ve made on numerous occasions. Even though they’ve just met each other, they know the others must die for them to live, and struggle with this hard fact. After spending this time getting to know them and watching characters cope, each death ends up feeling like losing your own friend.
This is done deliberately as the film is supposed to be an allegory for the Vietnam War. The symbolism used for this allegory is very well done in my opinion. Showing the boys on a walk to their death as a parallel to what the writers believed the Vietnam war was, a walk to one’s death. The film does something very interesting as well with the governments’ refusal to use the words “kill” or “death.” Always using filler words or phrases like “punching your ticket” or “deactivation.” I believe this is trying to draw a parallel to how the United States presented itself as saviors in the Vietnam war and refused to acknowledge the true nature of the war.
The cinematography of the film is also expertly crafted in my opinion. We see bright skies and lush forest at the beginning of the walk, but throughout the film it slowly grows more grim. As time goes on, we see more of the landscape and the tones become gray. We see burning cars, poor families, and desolate towns. Reflecting the shift in tone the movie has taken throughout. The same can be said about how they present the characters. In the beginning they use a lot of close shots with most characters just being in the background, but as more characters get their tickets punched the shots zoom out, emphasizing the loss of life that has transpired.
The film uses all of these techniques to craft an extremely well done story about family, friendship, war, and the struggle to survive and leaves you begging the question. Why would anyone choose to enter this competition? Well, the movie says, much like war, “nobody signs up for [the walk], not really.”
Chayce LeShawn Papp is a second-year English major at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma.
