Directing: C+
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

Stephen King wrote the novel The Long Walk when he was 19 years old. It was the first one he ever wrote, though not the first to be published (that was Carrie, published when he was 27). That would place the writing of The Long Walk during King’s college years in the late 1960s, during the peak of the Vietnam War—for which reviewers later interpreted this novel as being a metaphor.

Now, nearly 60 years after it was written and 46 years after it was first published, The Long Walk gets its first-ever film adaptation, starring Cooper Hoffman (the late Philip Seymour’s son), David Jonsson, Charlie Plummer, Mark Hamill, and more. I don’t know if Stephen King is just trying to cash in on as many film adaptations as possible or what, but I can’t say this film works all that well as a metaphor for much of anything, much less the Vietnam War, which has largely passed out of an active place in the American cultural consciousness. We have young adults now with no memory of 9/11.

The Long Walk is getting some rave reviews, and I can’t quite understand why. It has strong performances and is well shot, so it kept my attention, but I still rather found it lacking. The story is set 19 years after a war has left the United States in economic dire states and a diminished place in the world. I suppose it could be argued that it doesn’t matter, but the story as presented here tells us nothing else about why the war happened or how our society got to a place where there is an annual marathon with one “winner” from each state who must walk through a desolate rural America, always at least at 3 miles per hour on penalty of execution after three warnings, until only one of them is left.

This is where even the Vietnam War “metaphor” idea falls apart, because these young men volunteer for this opportunity—they aren’t drafted. The winner is granted one wish as well as riches beyond their wildest dreams, and much is made of the country being so economically depressed that everyone they know is eager to volunteer out of desperation. But that’s not exactly the same thing, is it? Average young men didn’t enlist for the Vietnam War out of desperation; they were forced into it by the draft.

“The Long Walk” is indeed televised for the country, and Mark Hamill as “The Major” mentions how production picks up all around the country each year after the Walk. This brings in a dark sort of televised entertainment into the premise, which is both similar to and pre-dates the likes of Kōshun Takami’s Battle Royale (published 1999) or Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (published 2008)—or indeed even Stephen King’s own The Running Man (published 1982), which itself is getting a second film adaption released later this fall, starring Glenn Powell (the 1987 adaptation starred Arnold Schwarzenegger).

The Running Man looks to be far more fun than The Long Walk, which leaves me still looking forward to it, albeit with a cautious optimism. At least that one promises exciting action set pieces, of which The Long Walk has none: my companion at The Long Walk today noted that it was the most violent movie she had ever seen with no action in it. It’s just a bunch of young men either walking, or, when they get too tired or get injured so they can’t keep the pace, getting shot. And you should get fair warning here: the kills in this movie are pretty gruesome, especially the first one, which shows a bullet tearing through a guy’s face. In many of the rest of the examples, you see bits flying out the other side of their head when they get shot. There’s quite a bit of this, but it’s not the only type of gross thing you’ll see: I’ll just say that one guy winds up with some gastrointestinal trouble, and we get a direct look at the results. I can only hope that I go with more dignity when I die.

But, basically, all these guys sign up for a 98% chance of an ignominious death. With there being 50 contestants of “The Long Walk,” I found myself running nerdy numbers in my head. For instance: if we assume 10% of the population is queer, then at least 5 of these guys should have been queer, but we don’t get a single gay character—a common issue with Stephen King’s vastly prolific writing, in which nearly everyone is cisgender and straight. Instead, we get a somewhat shocking amount of homophobic banter between these young men. I can’t figure out if JT Mollner, who adapted King’s novel into this screenplay, was just staying true to how King represented young men in the sixties, or if we are meant to rationalize this detail as the inevitable backsliding of social mores in a country that has become far-right authoritarian. The problem is that The Long Walk as a film provides no such clarity, so we’re just left to take the way these guys talk to each other at face value.

We don’t even get backstory on any individual characters. The closest is Raymond Garraty (Hoffman), the lead character, whose letter congratulating him on winning this “lottery” to represent his state serves as the opening title card. We see his mother (Judy Greer) driving him to the meeting point and breaking down when they say goodbye, and later we get the single real flashback regarding what was the ultimate fate of Garrett’s father—who defied national law by sharing old music and pop culture that is now banned with his son. That’s the extent of it with Garraty, and none of the other 49 contestants get even that treatment—not even Peter McVries (Jonsson, who was very impressive as the synthetic, Andy, in Alien: Romulus), who is eventually revealed to be the co-lead of the film.

Garraty reveals a plan to avenge his father, which prompts some wise advice from McVries: “Vengeance doesn’t help.” In the end, this is a big part of what makes how The Long Walk ends—very differently from the novel, to be clear—so baffling. It’s as though writer JT Mollner, and director Francis Lawrence, can’t decide what they’re trying to say. The Long Walk is clearly designed to be unsettling, and it very much works on that front. But, to what end? The character left standing at the end makes a truly momentous choice that is antithetical to what had previously seemed to be his own wisdom, and then walks off into the night in an environment that suddenly changes in a way that makes no practical sense. Are we supposed to take this at face value, or is this a fantasy in a character’s head? Again: this movie doesn’t seem to know. It would be one thing if The Long Walk were being provocatively ambiguous, but it feels more like it just doesn’t quite know what it’s going for. To that end, I can tell you what you should be going for: a better movie.

Overall: B-