Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Long Walk.
In the course of his 50-plus-year writing career, there’s been a good bit of debate over Stephen King’s ability to deliver a satisfying ending. While critics and readers alike have frequently dinged the author for the arguably disappointing conclusions to many of his novels, King himself doesn’t seem too fazed by that narrative.
In 2019’s It Chapter Two, director Andy Muschietti’s follow-up to his hit 2017 adaptation of the first half of King’s book, King appears in a cameo role to poke fun at his reputation for unpopular resolutions. Playing an antique store owner, King cheekily tells James McAvoy’s famous author character Bill that he didn’t like the finale of his latest novel. The so-called King of Horror has also addressed his aversion to preplanned endings, writing in his 2000 memoir On Writing, “I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible. Why worry about the ending anyway? Why be such a control freak?”
King’s extemporary approach to writing has resulted in Hollywood filmmakers frequently altering the endings of his stories when adapting his work for the big screen—to mixed results, at least according to King. While writer-director Frank Darabont’s revisions to properties like The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist earned praise from the author, he famously hated Stanley Kubrick’s take on The Shining (despite the film’s legendary standing among horror fans).
Now, a new King adaptation directed by I Am Legend and Hunger Games franchise helmer Francis Lawrence from a screenplay by JT Mollner (Strange Darling) is making waves for putting a fresh spin on the ending of the 1979 book on which it’s based. The Long Walk is King’s first-written novel and one of seven books he published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Set in a totalitarian future America, the movie version, now in theaters, tracks the progression of the titular annual event, a televised march to the death undertaken by 50 young men hoping to drastically improve their lots in life by emerging as the sole survivor and winner of the brutal competition.
What is the Long Walk?
The rules of the Long Walk are simple. Every participant must maintain a continuous speed of three miles per hour while walking along a set path. If they slow down, stop, or stray from the road for any reason, armed soldiers will give them up to three warnings before shooting them at point blank range. The last man standing wins a life-changing cash prize and the fulfillment of any one wish their heart desires.
The walk is presided over by its creator, a mysterious authoritarian figure known as the Major (Mark Hamill) who extolls the sadistic contest as a boon for the spirits of the impoverished American people. We know there was a devastating civil war that gave rise to an oppressive fascistic regime and plunged the U.S. into an economic spiral, but we don’t learn many details about the state of the country beyond that.
The story centers on Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman, son of the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman), a young man who has volunteered for the walk with the express goal of using his victory wish to get his hands on one of the guards’ assault rifles and gun down the Major. Ray’s father was a dissenter who was executed by the Major himself for his outspoken anti-authoritarian views, and Ray wants revenge.
However, as his bond with fellow walker Peter McVries (David Jonsson) deepens over the course of hundreds of miles, Ray begins to reconsider whether his quest for vengeance will serve the purpose he thought it would. “To me, that’s what the whole thing is about. The whole thing is about [Garraty and McVries] bonding, and kind of falling in love in a weird way,” Lawrence told Vanity Fair. “The conflict of what they’re there for and what they’ve been through in the past only brings them closer together. The sacrifices they make for one another, to me, is the whole movie.”
The film largely follows the trajectory of the novel, but changes some details along the way—and adds one new, final twist that subverts the overall message of King’s dystopian tale.
How does The Long Walk movie end?
Although King has said he didn’t explicitly intend it that way, The Long Walk novel is often seen as an allegorical critique of the Vietnam War and the senseless death and spectacle of state-sanctioned violence that accompanied the conflict.
“You write from your times, so certainly, that was in my mind. But I never thought about it consciously,” King told Vanity Fair. “I was writing a kind of a brutal thing. It was hopeless, and just what you write when you’re 19 years old, man. You’re full of beans and you’re full of cynicism, and that’s the way it was.”
Still, King’s story ends on a suitably bleak note for that reading. After McVries chooses to sit down and accept his death and Stebbins (played in the movie by Garrett Wareing) collapses from exhaustion, Garraty is the only remaining walker. However, instead of celebrating his victory or even realizing he has won, Garraty continues on in pursuit of a dark figure beckoning to him in the distance, thinking the words, “There was still so far left to walk,” before somehow finding the strength to run.
It’s a darkly ambiguous conclusion that seems to suggest Garraty’s psyche has been shattered by the experience and the walk will never result in any true victory. The movie, on the other hand, offers a more definitive and, to a certain degree, hopeful ending that highlights the power of human connection in the face of brutality.
Once Garraty and McVries are the only walkers who remain, McVries attempts to kneel down and sacrifice himself to allow Garraty to win. However, Garraty runs back and convinces his friend to walk a little further with him before taking advantage of McVries’ distracted state to do what McVries had planned to do for him. After McVries wins, he uses his one wish to request a gun and, despite knowing it’s a death sentence, kills the Major just like Garraty had told him he originally planned to do. He then continues walking down the street.
“It’s about acts of kindness and how they affect you,” Jonsson told Vanity Fair of the movie’s message. “You get that beautiful act of surrender, of putting you before me. That’s part of McVries’s journey with Garrity. How do you pass on the kindness that was given to you?”
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