A Longa Marcha - Caminhe ou Morra

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.

Wow, let me start by saying I didn't have a clue what I was walking into other than Stephen King being attached to this project. This movie is brutal, which is a shocking way to describe a movie that I thought is one of the best I have seen in a long time. My stomach was twisting and my leg developed a nervous twitch the deeper into the film I got. By the last quarter of the film, I had tears in my eyes and could hardly keep it together. So you are probably wondering, why? Well this movie cuts right to the heart of why any of us choose to get up each morning and walk around all day, even when life is throwing everything bad at us. It's because it's what you do when you are alive, you walk, and you walk because you have purpose. And we walk in spite of the fact we all know that one day we won't be able to walk anymore because our time will be up. Some decide when to quit their walk, some have their bodies or minds decide for them, and many continue their walk because of those they love picking them up and helping them move forward. And some just walk because that's all they know to do, survive. I won't say anymore, other than watch this film and prepare yourself for a hard but necessary watch. Bravo to all those involved with this film and story.

The Long Walk is one of my favorite books and I have been dreaming of a movie adaptation. I felt it was promising for the first 30 minutes, mostly due to wonderfully brutal cinematography. However, as soon as the drama ramped up, actors started to overact and the whole script all of a sudden derailed into Hollywood cliche land. I felt like the movie pretty much cut out all the parts of the book I loved the most and butchered the final scenes into something completely different than the subtle but powerful book ending intended to convey.

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.

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.