The Long Walk - Todesmarsch

Read the book as a kid, and it never left me.

Stephen King - writing as Richard Bachman - didn't need monsters or explosions to terrify.

He gave us a hundred boys walking down an endless road, dying one by one under the weight of exhaustion, fear, and quiet madness.

It was slow, suffocating, and profoundly human. The horror wasn't in the gunfire - it was in the silence between steps.

And then came the 2025 "movie".

Absolute betrayal. Everything that made the book powerful - the tension, the intimacy, the claustrophobic pacing - is gone.

Filmmakers clearly didn't trust the story's simplicity, so they threw in noise, chaos, and overexposed emotion.

Turned King's psychological death march into yet another dystopian action flick with shaky cameras and empty dialogue.

Characters are cardboard cutouts delivering cliché lines between slow-motion shots.

Watching this movie felt like watching someone pave over a graveyard. Hollywood gloss and lazy direction that doesn't respect the story. It doesn't even seem to understand it.

Shallow and soulless Garbage.

It was an ok movie, too much missed potential as they could have done so much more. More talking than action. There was no moments that really hit you and it felt kind of repetitive and you could see how the story would go from the beginning. A lot of things were out of nowhere, ofcourse people die but some of them the way they go out just has no substance, and there's no real twist that takes place. You know how most movies have a crisis in the middle that needs to be overcome? This movie doesn't have that. The ending was super annoying also and contradicts what was preached throughout the movie. I watched this based on the 7*+ ratings, but in my opinion it doesn't match up to any 7* movie I've ever seen, hence the rating.

If you film a much loved book, say Lord of the Rings for this example, and, at the council of Elrond, Gandalf says "Oh, you want to take the ring to Gondor Boromir? OK then", fans of the book are going to be disappointed. And that's how I feel right now. Unlike LOTR, The Long Walk does not have a great deal of action in the traditional sense, so why remove what important moments there are: an adolescent who's never had sex risking everything for a kiss? The barbaric nature of huge crowds gathered to cheer on boys about to die? Or to gamble what small funds they have on who will survive? Why remove all the things that made a novel so special and decide your scriptwriter knows best?

The ending is changed and not convincing and while I can imagine Hollywood require more resolution than the original text, I don't think this was the way to go personally.

Apart from the changes, I thought most of the cast did well but were a bit too well fed and healthy for the supposed economic misery this US faced.

I'll start by saying I haven't read Stephen King's book, but the concept of a dystopian death march with one winner and no finish line sounded pretty intriguing.

Turns out, it's just... walking. For almost two hours. Straight.

I didn't know exactly what to expect, but I guess I should've known better - watching people walk (and talk, and occasionally fall over) probably can't carry an entire movie. The film kind of flatlines early on and just keeps dragging its feet, literally. Nothing major really happens - it's just endless walking with bits of dialogue sprinkled in, and none of it feels impactful enough to justify the runtime.

It's like watching a horror movie without horror, or a war movie without war - just the awkward middle bits where everyone's sweaty and miserable. The concept had potential, but it feels like it forgot to actually go anywhere (ironically).

Most of the characters are forgettable or painfully stereotypical: the cocky one, the quiet one, the emotional one, the guy who clearly won't make it past the halfway point, and a few randoms who seem to exist just to fill the quota of "people who can die later". Some are purposely annoying, some are just... there. And while I get that the point is supposed to be bleak and psychological, it ends up feeling weirdly hollow.

The film tries to say something deep about humanity, sacrifice, survival, or whatever, but it never quite lands. In the end, it's just a story about a short-lived friendship that won't last, told through the world's longest, most uneventful walk.

I wouldn't say it's bad-bad.. it's just frustratingly dull. It's one of those films where you keep waiting for something to happen... and then the credits roll.

In essence, The Long Walk is a long watch.

In the book the horror of watching young men get shot is highlighted by the unfeeling, voracious crowds lining the street, the betting rings encouraging people to gamble their savings on their favourite, the desperation of some ghouls for a ticket where they sit. This is left out of the movie and, given the lack of action in the conventional sense, I don't see why. What we get instead is a long chat.

The ending is also rewritten and is unsatisfactory in my opinion. It is an ultimately disappointing movie despite the strong cast.