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Nov. 3rd, 2025 03:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amado1 I titled my last entry "The Long Walk" and then forgot to talk about it at all. Spoiler-filled review ahead, for both the book and the movie.
So, this was one of my favorite Stephen King books. I read it when I was a teenager and totally fell in love. It's a great little critique of the Vietnam War; it's set in a mostly-normal America, where the only difference is a slight, realistic military overreach (the kind of thing that America can and does slip into during wartime) and the existence of an annual competition called the long walk. Boys willingly sign up for this walk, even though they know it's a death sentence: you walk without breaks at 4mph until only one boy is left. Soldiers ride alongside the boys with guns aimed at them, ready to shoot if they stop walking. The kids enter for the glory and fame, and for the prize, which is "anything you want for the rest of your life." The boys themselves seem to be uncertain whether "anything you want" is a one-time wish or something you can tap into forever, which I like; it seems realistic to me that children signing up for a competition like this would be young and inattentive enough to not even fully understand the rewards.
The novel follows Ray Garraty, a teenager from Maine who feels compelled to join the walk but can't quite explain why, and is troubled by that. His dad got into some political trouble with the military some time back and was "squadded," which is never explained to readers (and again, I like that). But Ray's wish, when he wins, isn't necessarily to save his dad; iirc we never find out what his wish is, like Ray himself doesn't really know. The other kids on the walk have similarly vague reasons for joining: one kid joined out of spite because his friends and family laughed at the idea of him participating, for example. Another kid thinks it will win him some approval from his father, and another is married and has a pregnant wife, so he wants to provide for her. The reasoning for these kids deliberately mirrors the reasons why real-life teens join the military.
As the walk goes on, the boys die in gruesome, petty ways -- if you fall below 4mph too many times, you're shot in the head; if you veer off the road, even for a second, you're dead. Blisters, charley horses, falling asleep, etc., all become death sentences pretty quickly. At the same time, the boys can't help but make friends with each other -- they're desperate for affection and camaraderie during this march. Ray becomes part of a squad of Musketeers, the most important of whom is smartass Peter McVries. He's also intrigued by a skinny weirdo named Stebbins, who dresses in odd rainbow-colored clothes and stuffs his mouth with jelly sandwiches. Stebbins seems like a sure goner, but as the march goes on, he keeps a steady pace and a calm mind, and Ray starts to get unnerved by him.
In the end, it's down to McVries, Ray, and Stebbins. McVries gives up and sits down, and he's shot; Ray gives up some time later and turns to tell Stebbins so, only for Stebbins to die of exhaustion before Ray can get the words out that he's conceding. So Ray wins, but he's so traumatized and exhausted that he doesn't realize it. He suffers from Third Man Syndrome and sees another (hallucinated) walker up ahead of him, so he just ignores the military officer (the Major) trying to offer him his prize, and hurries to catch up with the other walker, convinced the long walk is still going on.
Now, the movie.... is mostly okay. But it suffers from a lot of things: some big changes which really fuck with the plot, some minor changes that annoy the piss out of me and take the sting out of the anti-war critique, and some Hunger Games-ification that just make the world-building seem ... stupid.
Hunger Games-ification:
- in the book, 100 candidates are chosen at random from a lottery. In the movie, it's 50 contestants, one from every state (two tributes from each District...) This narrows the scope of the story and deflates the trauma, but it also kind of works, because it allows the movie to focus in on the main characters a bit more. It ALSO fucks with the plot a bit, though. I watched it with my mom, and she was extremely confused and annoyed because, "They said there are 100 candidates in the opening crawl, then they said there are only 50 candidates, then they only read out like 15 names, and they skipped a ton of numbers and ended at #47! Where the hell did all the other kids go??"
- instead of Ray's dad being squadded, his dad is explicitly executed, IN FRONT OF RAY, BY THE MAJOR??? So now the main character has an ultra-tragic backstory, and instead of his wish being left unstated, his wish is explicitly to take a carbine from one of the soldiers and kill the Major?? This is such a silly choice. Again, my mom's reaction: "So the guy who killed his dad conveniently happens to be the guy in charge of the walk? Okay..." This change, like all the other significant changes, brought with it some original non-King writing which was painfully cheesy and brought me right out of the movie. It felt like I'd stepped out of a horror movie and into a YA dystopian novel.
- speaking of dystopian... it's been a while since I read the book, so I might be wrong, but what I recall is that it's set in Just Normal America (a little bit to the right). In the movie, there's a mysterious "Big War" that happened nebulously at some point before the events of the film, and that Big War has plunged America into a cartoonish totalitarian dystopia. It's giving Hunger Games again.
- the long walk itself is also Hunger Games-ified. In the book, it's just a competition that the boys willingly enter for glory, just like real teens join the military for the sake of glory, or for money, or whatever. In the movie, the long walk is a mandatory yearly competition that the government forces children to participate in, in order to preach the value of hard work and economic hope. I can't stress enough that it's giving Hunger Games.
Now for the minor changes that irked me:
It's mostly to do with personality changes. The plot is almost word-for-word lifted from the book. The same kids die in the same ways and in the same order (until the end) -- and they share names with characters from the book, but not personality. Sometimes that's just a little annoying, but it doesn't impact the movie's quality at all. Other times it's a bafflingly bad decision that DOES impact the movie. So here are some of the changes:
Peter McVries: in the book, Pete is a cheerful smartass with a brooding streak; he's outgoing, he makes friends easily, but sometimes he runs his mouth too much, which can have terrible consequences in a competition like this -- and that causes him a lot of guilt and shame. He comes from a big, happy family, but he does have a mysterious scar on his face. In the movie, any of Pete's negative traits are scrubbed away: he is calm, gentle, supportive, mature, and perfectly in-control. His scar is transformed into a ludicrously YA type of tragic backstory: he was orphaned in the big war and spent his childhood sleeping on the streets, stealing, and getting into knife fights. He's still quite likable -- the actor playing him is effortlessly charming -- but he's a very one-dimensional character, and he's so perfect that I was constantly wondering why the hell he's friends with Ray.
Hank Olson: in the book, Hank is a confident Catholic kid who seems capable and self-assured, a definite contender. His faith is used to devastating effect a few times, especially when he dies, and his confidence and competence are utilized the same way -- when Hank unexpectedly deteriorates and loses heart, it's horrifying because it contrasts so sharply with who he was at the start. In the movie, Hank is a small (maybe somewhat chubby, or just dressed poorly) smart-aleck whose confidence is all bluster, making him the butt of the joke. He's never convincing as a possible winner, so it has no particular effect on the viewer when he deteriorates. His religion is never referenced, which makes it extra confusing when he suddenly spouts off a religious line before he dies. Most egregiously, Hank is given a piece of backstory from the character Scramm (who is scrubbed from the film) -- after his EXTREMELY DRAMATIC AND HORRIFYING death, we find out that Hank is married.
Terrible. Why doesn't that work? Let's explore real quick:
In the book, Scramm is everyone top choice for this year's winner. He's a huge, gentle giant type of guy from a small rural town, and he's physically powerful. Everyone is intimidated by him because you can't help but look at this guy and think, "Oh god, I've got no chance. I'm gonna die." But at the same time, you can't help but kind of root for him at the expense of yourself. He's married; his wife is pregnant; he's the only guy here who has people relying on him and an actually good reason to seek the prize. He's also a bit dumb, so you sort of feel like, "Damn, he's never gonna make money any other way, he really needs this." As Scramm deteriorates, the other boys rally around him and promise to take care of his wife and baby, and with that knowledge Scramm can finally peacefully give up and die. It's very moving!
Now, Hank's wife is not utilized nearly so well. We don't find out about her until after Hank dies. RIGHT after he dies, which feels like a pacing misstep -- his death was already far and away the most impactful so far, we don't need to lazily tack another sad fact on at the end. Hank is the first boy to try to change things. He rushes the guards and tries to steal a gun, and he's shot in the gut and left to bleed out. It's the first slow death, and it's also the first death where other walkers break rank and turn back to comfort him, putting themselves in danger. That's a LOT going on. A quick, "By the way he's married" at the end kind of cheapens that and takes you out of it, especially since Hank is so young and unserious that you can't really picture him getting married. Also, the info that Hank is married comes from a random side character; Hank never shared this info with any of his friends, and we never get any hint that he had any kind of friendship with the random guy who knows.
This leads well into another changed character, Barkovitch. Barkovictch's personality in the book and film are more or less the same: he's a ruthless kid, the only walker who openly, proudly sees this as a fight to the death. He antagonizes other characters constantly and brags about how he's going to dance on their graves. In both film and book, Barkovitch goads another boy into fighting him, then dodges his punches until the boy trips and falls; the boy is shot and killed by the soldiers escorting the boys on their walk. In the book, the other boys ostracize Barkovitch after this, and it makes him feel bad; he's desperate for their approval, and when Scramm dies, Barkovitch promises to take care of his wife and baby in an attempt to win the others back. It doesn't really work, and Barkovitch ends up killing himself.
In the movie, Barkovitch has some pre-existing mental illness that is exacerbated by the walk. He starts hearing voices and self-harming after he kills the other kid; the guilt eats at him, and even though we're not shown any particular ostracization, he still offers to take care of Hank's wife, and then kills himself immediately after. That's bad. Lmao. I mean, I really don't like the switch from, "He was ostracized and the loneliness killed him" to "he was just crazy, don't worry about it." But the worst change is where Barkovitch is FROM. Remember that this is a Vietnam War novel!! Barkovitch in the book is from Washington, D.C.! The kid who ruthlessly brags about winning, goads other kids into their deaths, and is only swayed by social status is from Washington, D.C. Gee, that seems important. Where's he from in the movie? The South.
Yeah, what a resounding war critique. The real bad guy was poor mentally ill kids from the South all along.
OK, and my biggest pet peeve is the changes made to Stebbins, my favorite character as a teen. Stebbins, as I said earlier, is a weird scrawny kid who stands out right from the start. He seems to have no sense of strategy and no concern about the walk -- he's stuffing himself with jelly sandwiches before the walk even begins, and he's dressed in weird clothes that don't fit the long march (iirc it's like, purple corduroy pants, a green cardigan, a blue dress shirt). But as the book goes on, it becomes clear that Stebbins is not just weird but foxy-smart. He's constantly observing the other boys and making sharp incisive comments about their personalities that really bother them; and his stamina is insane, he just keeps going. Toward the end of the book, Stebbins reveals that the Major is his dad; he's a bastard, and he's been reared up to join the walk not as a winner, but as a rabbit for the greyhounds to chase. His job is to keep the other boys going as long as possible and then to die.
In the movie, Stebbins is a fucking nothingburger, man. First of all they made the worst change possible: he's tall and fit. The main characters see him and call him "Superman" in the first scene and worry that they'll have no chance against that guy. Okay... T_T whatever. Stebbins spends most of the movie silently walking behind the main characters, sometimes in-frame, sometimes not. He has practically no lines. Toward the end he delivers his "I'm a bastard, I'm the rabbit" speech but with some subtle changes that make it seem like he thought the Major would guarantee that he won. So... he's just an entitled rich kid who thought Daddy would set up the long walk for him??? There's no narrative tension to any of this. Stebbins' physical fitness is only highlighted once, and then it's immediately destroyed -- he gets sick on like the first night and spends the rest of the movie coughing and wheezing, not a real threat to anyone. Why make him fit at all if you're not gonna use that??
Okay, now for the major changes. Serious spoilers ahead.
In the book, Ray Garraty is both the POV character and the winner. Ray doesn't understand his own motivations for joining, he doesn't understand how he won, he doesn't understand that he did win, and he doesn't have a concrete wish. He just keeps walking. There's no undoing the trauma he went through; the walk is never over.
In the movie, Ray does have a concrete wish. His dad is dead and he wants revenge. He's going to wish for a carbine from one of the soldiers, and then he's going to shoot the Major. McVries argues with him about this, pointing out that it's not practical. It's not going to change anything, and Ray is just going to get killed immediately, leaving his mom both a widow and childless. Ray comes around. At the end, when Stebbins dies, it's Pete McVries and Ray left. The movie does a fake-out of a scene from the book where McVries sits down and gives up. But in this version, Ray goes back and saves him. He convinces McVries to keep walking with him for just a little while longer, and McVries reluctantly agrees. But as soon as McVries gets walking, Ray falls back deliberately and sacrifices himself instead.
McVries is the winner. He wishes for a carbine and shoots the Major. Nobody attacks him or shoots back, he just turns around and keeps walking, and...
hhhhhhh....
It feels like such an immature, quaint, children's-book ending to me. Like, I hate to keep harping on it and bringing up the same series, but it's so Hunger Games it hurts. "Don't worry kids, war is evil but you can fix everything by killing the one singular bad guy! All you need is bravery! And a gun!" I think, and I've paused a lot to think here, that what the movie did is take a novel about teenagers but meant for adults and turned it into a YA blockbuster for teens. I don't think The Long Walk is effective as a YA anti-war novel; I read it as a teen and still joined the military! But for adults, it's a very rewarding harrowing story about the Vietnam War, and all of that seems scrubbed -- first by removing it further from real American life (big war! new regime! the Old Ways!!) and second by inserting so many cheesy, explicit "this is the moral of the story" moments, and third by switching the ending from a bleak "no escape" heartbreaker to a (still somewhat ambiguous but more...) cheerful "the good guys win and it was actually so easy" revolution.
(Yeah, you can argue that the ending's ambiguous. I've seen some people strain to say that McVries was killed by soldiers after he shot the Major, and him walking away at the end is him walking into the afterlife. Sure. You can argue anything. I don't think it was done well, though, if that was the intention. There's no indication that the soldiers will shoot him; they stand by with their guns down and watch as McVries threatens the Major for several minutes before shooting him).
I think there are some obvious issues with adapting the Long Walk, but those issues could be handled very creatively and skillfully -- the biggest issue that comes to mind is that we no longer have an active draft, or really an active war, so the impact is going to be different unless you somehow adapt it to fit more modern conflicts. But ... I think ... you could handle that much better, actually, by sticking to the book's worldbuilding (the boys enlist for nebulous reasons they don't fully understand, and now they're stuck here) instead of making it MORE explicitly a draft (the boys discuss at length how no one really has a choice but to join the walk, AND they all have concrete reasons for joining, a la "my name is Katniss and I have 26 entries in this year's Hunger Games because my family is poor and I need food"). Also, I've read that the movie is supposedly set in an alternate 1970s. I didn't see any hint of that in the movie itself -- no effort was made to set this in a certain time or place. But if you're going to do that, why not lean into it? Why not say, "the Vietnam War" instead of "the big war"? Why not dig into this alternate universe a bit more? At the very least it would help pump up the movie's anti-war themes. You don't win any points with me by erasing specificity from your story, especially when that specificity is conducive to a more pointed critique of war. It reminded me somewhat of Civil War, where the director took pains to never say who was fighting or why. Ambiguity can be great when it serves the story, but that wasn't the case for either Civil War or the Long Walk; refusing to ground an anti-war movie in real American politics/history just feels like a cop-out.
I'll end it on a kind of positive note -- there's one change that I'm not mad about, and that's the handling of homosexuality/masculinity. In the book there are subtle come-ons between Ray and McVries, and it gives Ray a huge crisis about his sexuality. It's "quiet" enough that I missed it as a teen, but loud enough to get ample space on the book's Wikipedia page. In the movie, it's much more explicit -- McVries, at least, is clearly gay, and there's a "coming out" moment where it's clear that Ray understands this and has to process it. We do lose all of Ray's sexuality crisis, though. He's still the POV character, but we really don't get inside his head, and he never speaks aloud about his sexuality or how he views his own masculinity. You win some, you lose some.
So, this was one of my favorite Stephen King books. I read it when I was a teenager and totally fell in love. It's a great little critique of the Vietnam War; it's set in a mostly-normal America, where the only difference is a slight, realistic military overreach (the kind of thing that America can and does slip into during wartime) and the existence of an annual competition called the long walk. Boys willingly sign up for this walk, even though they know it's a death sentence: you walk without breaks at 4mph until only one boy is left. Soldiers ride alongside the boys with guns aimed at them, ready to shoot if they stop walking. The kids enter for the glory and fame, and for the prize, which is "anything you want for the rest of your life." The boys themselves seem to be uncertain whether "anything you want" is a one-time wish or something you can tap into forever, which I like; it seems realistic to me that children signing up for a competition like this would be young and inattentive enough to not even fully understand the rewards.
The novel follows Ray Garraty, a teenager from Maine who feels compelled to join the walk but can't quite explain why, and is troubled by that. His dad got into some political trouble with the military some time back and was "squadded," which is never explained to readers (and again, I like that). But Ray's wish, when he wins, isn't necessarily to save his dad; iirc we never find out what his wish is, like Ray himself doesn't really know. The other kids on the walk have similarly vague reasons for joining: one kid joined out of spite because his friends and family laughed at the idea of him participating, for example. Another kid thinks it will win him some approval from his father, and another is married and has a pregnant wife, so he wants to provide for her. The reasoning for these kids deliberately mirrors the reasons why real-life teens join the military.
As the walk goes on, the boys die in gruesome, petty ways -- if you fall below 4mph too many times, you're shot in the head; if you veer off the road, even for a second, you're dead. Blisters, charley horses, falling asleep, etc., all become death sentences pretty quickly. At the same time, the boys can't help but make friends with each other -- they're desperate for affection and camaraderie during this march. Ray becomes part of a squad of Musketeers, the most important of whom is smartass Peter McVries. He's also intrigued by a skinny weirdo named Stebbins, who dresses in odd rainbow-colored clothes and stuffs his mouth with jelly sandwiches. Stebbins seems like a sure goner, but as the march goes on, he keeps a steady pace and a calm mind, and Ray starts to get unnerved by him.
In the end, it's down to McVries, Ray, and Stebbins. McVries gives up and sits down, and he's shot; Ray gives up some time later and turns to tell Stebbins so, only for Stebbins to die of exhaustion before Ray can get the words out that he's conceding. So Ray wins, but he's so traumatized and exhausted that he doesn't realize it. He suffers from Third Man Syndrome and sees another (hallucinated) walker up ahead of him, so he just ignores the military officer (the Major) trying to offer him his prize, and hurries to catch up with the other walker, convinced the long walk is still going on.
Now, the movie.... is mostly okay. But it suffers from a lot of things: some big changes which really fuck with the plot, some minor changes that annoy the piss out of me and take the sting out of the anti-war critique, and some Hunger Games-ification that just make the world-building seem ... stupid.
Hunger Games-ification:
- in the book, 100 candidates are chosen at random from a lottery. In the movie, it's 50 contestants, one from every state (two tributes from each District...) This narrows the scope of the story and deflates the trauma, but it also kind of works, because it allows the movie to focus in on the main characters a bit more. It ALSO fucks with the plot a bit, though. I watched it with my mom, and she was extremely confused and annoyed because, "They said there are 100 candidates in the opening crawl, then they said there are only 50 candidates, then they only read out like 15 names, and they skipped a ton of numbers and ended at #47! Where the hell did all the other kids go??"
- instead of Ray's dad being squadded, his dad is explicitly executed, IN FRONT OF RAY, BY THE MAJOR??? So now the main character has an ultra-tragic backstory, and instead of his wish being left unstated, his wish is explicitly to take a carbine from one of the soldiers and kill the Major?? This is such a silly choice. Again, my mom's reaction: "So the guy who killed his dad conveniently happens to be the guy in charge of the walk? Okay..." This change, like all the other significant changes, brought with it some original non-King writing which was painfully cheesy and brought me right out of the movie. It felt like I'd stepped out of a horror movie and into a YA dystopian novel.
- speaking of dystopian... it's been a while since I read the book, so I might be wrong, but what I recall is that it's set in Just Normal America (a little bit to the right). In the movie, there's a mysterious "Big War" that happened nebulously at some point before the events of the film, and that Big War has plunged America into a cartoonish totalitarian dystopia. It's giving Hunger Games again.
- the long walk itself is also Hunger Games-ified. In the book, it's just a competition that the boys willingly enter for glory, just like real teens join the military for the sake of glory, or for money, or whatever. In the movie, the long walk is a mandatory yearly competition that the government forces children to participate in, in order to preach the value of hard work and economic hope. I can't stress enough that it's giving Hunger Games.
Now for the minor changes that irked me:
It's mostly to do with personality changes. The plot is almost word-for-word lifted from the book. The same kids die in the same ways and in the same order (until the end) -- and they share names with characters from the book, but not personality. Sometimes that's just a little annoying, but it doesn't impact the movie's quality at all. Other times it's a bafflingly bad decision that DOES impact the movie. So here are some of the changes:
Peter McVries: in the book, Pete is a cheerful smartass with a brooding streak; he's outgoing, he makes friends easily, but sometimes he runs his mouth too much, which can have terrible consequences in a competition like this -- and that causes him a lot of guilt and shame. He comes from a big, happy family, but he does have a mysterious scar on his face. In the movie, any of Pete's negative traits are scrubbed away: he is calm, gentle, supportive, mature, and perfectly in-control. His scar is transformed into a ludicrously YA type of tragic backstory: he was orphaned in the big war and spent his childhood sleeping on the streets, stealing, and getting into knife fights. He's still quite likable -- the actor playing him is effortlessly charming -- but he's a very one-dimensional character, and he's so perfect that I was constantly wondering why the hell he's friends with Ray.
Hank Olson: in the book, Hank is a confident Catholic kid who seems capable and self-assured, a definite contender. His faith is used to devastating effect a few times, especially when he dies, and his confidence and competence are utilized the same way -- when Hank unexpectedly deteriorates and loses heart, it's horrifying because it contrasts so sharply with who he was at the start. In the movie, Hank is a small (maybe somewhat chubby, or just dressed poorly) smart-aleck whose confidence is all bluster, making him the butt of the joke. He's never convincing as a possible winner, so it has no particular effect on the viewer when he deteriorates. His religion is never referenced, which makes it extra confusing when he suddenly spouts off a religious line before he dies. Most egregiously, Hank is given a piece of backstory from the character Scramm (who is scrubbed from the film) -- after his EXTREMELY DRAMATIC AND HORRIFYING death, we find out that Hank is married.
Terrible. Why doesn't that work? Let's explore real quick:
In the book, Scramm is everyone top choice for this year's winner. He's a huge, gentle giant type of guy from a small rural town, and he's physically powerful. Everyone is intimidated by him because you can't help but look at this guy and think, "Oh god, I've got no chance. I'm gonna die." But at the same time, you can't help but kind of root for him at the expense of yourself. He's married; his wife is pregnant; he's the only guy here who has people relying on him and an actually good reason to seek the prize. He's also a bit dumb, so you sort of feel like, "Damn, he's never gonna make money any other way, he really needs this." As Scramm deteriorates, the other boys rally around him and promise to take care of his wife and baby, and with that knowledge Scramm can finally peacefully give up and die. It's very moving!
Now, Hank's wife is not utilized nearly so well. We don't find out about her until after Hank dies. RIGHT after he dies, which feels like a pacing misstep -- his death was already far and away the most impactful so far, we don't need to lazily tack another sad fact on at the end. Hank is the first boy to try to change things. He rushes the guards and tries to steal a gun, and he's shot in the gut and left to bleed out. It's the first slow death, and it's also the first death where other walkers break rank and turn back to comfort him, putting themselves in danger. That's a LOT going on. A quick, "By the way he's married" at the end kind of cheapens that and takes you out of it, especially since Hank is so young and unserious that you can't really picture him getting married. Also, the info that Hank is married comes from a random side character; Hank never shared this info with any of his friends, and we never get any hint that he had any kind of friendship with the random guy who knows.
This leads well into another changed character, Barkovitch. Barkovictch's personality in the book and film are more or less the same: he's a ruthless kid, the only walker who openly, proudly sees this as a fight to the death. He antagonizes other characters constantly and brags about how he's going to dance on their graves. In both film and book, Barkovitch goads another boy into fighting him, then dodges his punches until the boy trips and falls; the boy is shot and killed by the soldiers escorting the boys on their walk. In the book, the other boys ostracize Barkovitch after this, and it makes him feel bad; he's desperate for their approval, and when Scramm dies, Barkovitch promises to take care of his wife and baby in an attempt to win the others back. It doesn't really work, and Barkovitch ends up killing himself.
In the movie, Barkovitch has some pre-existing mental illness that is exacerbated by the walk. He starts hearing voices and self-harming after he kills the other kid; the guilt eats at him, and even though we're not shown any particular ostracization, he still offers to take care of Hank's wife, and then kills himself immediately after. That's bad. Lmao. I mean, I really don't like the switch from, "He was ostracized and the loneliness killed him" to "he was just crazy, don't worry about it." But the worst change is where Barkovitch is FROM. Remember that this is a Vietnam War novel!! Barkovitch in the book is from Washington, D.C.! The kid who ruthlessly brags about winning, goads other kids into their deaths, and is only swayed by social status is from Washington, D.C. Gee, that seems important. Where's he from in the movie? The South.
Yeah, what a resounding war critique. The real bad guy was poor mentally ill kids from the South all along.
OK, and my biggest pet peeve is the changes made to Stebbins, my favorite character as a teen. Stebbins, as I said earlier, is a weird scrawny kid who stands out right from the start. He seems to have no sense of strategy and no concern about the walk -- he's stuffing himself with jelly sandwiches before the walk even begins, and he's dressed in weird clothes that don't fit the long march (iirc it's like, purple corduroy pants, a green cardigan, a blue dress shirt). But as the book goes on, it becomes clear that Stebbins is not just weird but foxy-smart. He's constantly observing the other boys and making sharp incisive comments about their personalities that really bother them; and his stamina is insane, he just keeps going. Toward the end of the book, Stebbins reveals that the Major is his dad; he's a bastard, and he's been reared up to join the walk not as a winner, but as a rabbit for the greyhounds to chase. His job is to keep the other boys going as long as possible and then to die.
In the movie, Stebbins is a fucking nothingburger, man. First of all they made the worst change possible: he's tall and fit. The main characters see him and call him "Superman" in the first scene and worry that they'll have no chance against that guy. Okay... T_T whatever. Stebbins spends most of the movie silently walking behind the main characters, sometimes in-frame, sometimes not. He has practically no lines. Toward the end he delivers his "I'm a bastard, I'm the rabbit" speech but with some subtle changes that make it seem like he thought the Major would guarantee that he won. So... he's just an entitled rich kid who thought Daddy would set up the long walk for him??? There's no narrative tension to any of this. Stebbins' physical fitness is only highlighted once, and then it's immediately destroyed -- he gets sick on like the first night and spends the rest of the movie coughing and wheezing, not a real threat to anyone. Why make him fit at all if you're not gonna use that??
Okay, now for the major changes. Serious spoilers ahead.
In the book, Ray Garraty is both the POV character and the winner. Ray doesn't understand his own motivations for joining, he doesn't understand how he won, he doesn't understand that he did win, and he doesn't have a concrete wish. He just keeps walking. There's no undoing the trauma he went through; the walk is never over.
In the movie, Ray does have a concrete wish. His dad is dead and he wants revenge. He's going to wish for a carbine from one of the soldiers, and then he's going to shoot the Major. McVries argues with him about this, pointing out that it's not practical. It's not going to change anything, and Ray is just going to get killed immediately, leaving his mom both a widow and childless. Ray comes around. At the end, when Stebbins dies, it's Pete McVries and Ray left. The movie does a fake-out of a scene from the book where McVries sits down and gives up. But in this version, Ray goes back and saves him. He convinces McVries to keep walking with him for just a little while longer, and McVries reluctantly agrees. But as soon as McVries gets walking, Ray falls back deliberately and sacrifices himself instead.
McVries is the winner. He wishes for a carbine and shoots the Major. Nobody attacks him or shoots back, he just turns around and keeps walking, and...
hhhhhhh....
It feels like such an immature, quaint, children's-book ending to me. Like, I hate to keep harping on it and bringing up the same series, but it's so Hunger Games it hurts. "Don't worry kids, war is evil but you can fix everything by killing the one singular bad guy! All you need is bravery! And a gun!" I think, and I've paused a lot to think here, that what the movie did is take a novel about teenagers but meant for adults and turned it into a YA blockbuster for teens. I don't think The Long Walk is effective as a YA anti-war novel; I read it as a teen and still joined the military! But for adults, it's a very rewarding harrowing story about the Vietnam War, and all of that seems scrubbed -- first by removing it further from real American life (big war! new regime! the Old Ways!!) and second by inserting so many cheesy, explicit "this is the moral of the story" moments, and third by switching the ending from a bleak "no escape" heartbreaker to a (still somewhat ambiguous but more...) cheerful "the good guys win and it was actually so easy" revolution.
(Yeah, you can argue that the ending's ambiguous. I've seen some people strain to say that McVries was killed by soldiers after he shot the Major, and him walking away at the end is him walking into the afterlife. Sure. You can argue anything. I don't think it was done well, though, if that was the intention. There's no indication that the soldiers will shoot him; they stand by with their guns down and watch as McVries threatens the Major for several minutes before shooting him).
I think there are some obvious issues with adapting the Long Walk, but those issues could be handled very creatively and skillfully -- the biggest issue that comes to mind is that we no longer have an active draft, or really an active war, so the impact is going to be different unless you somehow adapt it to fit more modern conflicts. But ... I think ... you could handle that much better, actually, by sticking to the book's worldbuilding (the boys enlist for nebulous reasons they don't fully understand, and now they're stuck here) instead of making it MORE explicitly a draft (the boys discuss at length how no one really has a choice but to join the walk, AND they all have concrete reasons for joining, a la "my name is Katniss and I have 26 entries in this year's Hunger Games because my family is poor and I need food"). Also, I've read that the movie is supposedly set in an alternate 1970s. I didn't see any hint of that in the movie itself -- no effort was made to set this in a certain time or place. But if you're going to do that, why not lean into it? Why not say, "the Vietnam War" instead of "the big war"? Why not dig into this alternate universe a bit more? At the very least it would help pump up the movie's anti-war themes. You don't win any points with me by erasing specificity from your story, especially when that specificity is conducive to a more pointed critique of war. It reminded me somewhat of Civil War, where the director took pains to never say who was fighting or why. Ambiguity can be great when it serves the story, but that wasn't the case for either Civil War or the Long Walk; refusing to ground an anti-war movie in real American politics/history just feels like a cop-out.
I'll end it on a kind of positive note -- there's one change that I'm not mad about, and that's the handling of homosexuality/masculinity. In the book there are subtle come-ons between Ray and McVries, and it gives Ray a huge crisis about his sexuality. It's "quiet" enough that I missed it as a teen, but loud enough to get ample space on the book's Wikipedia page. In the movie, it's much more explicit -- McVries, at least, is clearly gay, and there's a "coming out" moment where it's clear that Ray understands this and has to process it. We do lose all of Ray's sexuality crisis, though. He's still the POV character, but we really don't get inside his head, and he never speaks aloud about his sexuality or how he views his own masculinity. You win some, you lose some.
