Written by Varisa Sarisook
Nearly six decades after Stephen King began writing The Long Walk, its long-awaited film adaptation hit the screen in September 2025. The title summarizes the plot: fifty boys compete to be the last one standing in an annually televised death march. While almost 108 minutes of young men walking may sound dull, the film is anything but. Instead, The Long Walk packs a devastating blow and strikes a chord sixty years later.
Devastated by civil war, an alternate USA in the 1970s has become a police state. The Major oversees the Long Walk as a cure for “an epidemic of laziness”: one man from each state is randomly selected from a lottery to compete for a cash prize and a wish, his display of grit and masculinity meant to inspire productivity and restore the United States to her former superpower status. Dropping below the speed limit too often results in death by the soldiers flanking the march, and a ban on fighting does nothing to prevent bloodshed.
We follow Ray Garraty down this deadly road as he makes new friends and forms a strong bond with the optimistic, friendly Peter McVries. All the performances in this film shine, but Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson share a fantastic chemistry as Ray and Pete, trading laughter, rebukes, and confessions like the baseball they pass between them. Contrary to the expectations of the Walk, Ray constantly helps others at his own expense, from supporting one Walker with a leg cramp to offering his own rations to another. His altruism and friendly demeanor juxtapose his wish for a carbine to kill the Major as revenge for his execution of Ray’s father, who was found with subversive literature and refused to pledge allegiance. This pits him against Pete who, as a war orphan, sees the elder Garraty’s refusal as him abandoning his family for an abstract. Having grown up without it, Pete urges Ray to choose love and protect those he can, instead of losing himself in the quest for vengeance.
By the end of the film, our main characters find themselves in each other’s shoes. Ray sacrifices himself for Pete, believing in him if unable to see his vision of a better future. However, Pete’s optimism dies with Ray and he takes revenge on the Major, both to honor his friend’s wish and to punish the murder of a loved one, as Ray once sought to do. This reversal of their positions is not a clear criticism of either risking one’s life for a cause or choosing to protect the people we love by playing it safe. Rather, the story acknowledges both as a response to living under unjust powers.
The authoritarian setting of The Long Walk is by no means unique to the United States, but the context rings particularly true. Stephen King wrote The Long Walk observing US involvement in the Vietnam War, something that bleeds through the lottery system, the political repression, the young Americans drafted into a grueling operation and meaningless slaughter. I first watched The Long Walk last December, around the same time Donald Trump began announcing his Patriot Games for high school athletes. They seem a spectacle alongside the moral crusades against supposed spiritual decay, a distraction from the lack of socioeconomic solutions and the violence of his administration. The Long Walk still echoes the brutality of the US government within its own borders, not to mention what it does to people without. At the same time, resistance continues. As Peter McVries says, it is love for our fellow human beings, for the world, that must drive the fight.
