The Long Walk 4K 2025 Ultra HD 2160p

An alternative future. Every year in the US, the Long Walk is held—a nationwide event for which 100 young men aged 16-17 are carefully selected. It is a game of survival, where the main prize is a large sum of money and whatever else the winner desires for the rest of his life. The participants' task is to complete the route without slowing down to less than four miles per hour. Repeated violations of the distance requirement result in death.

But what if the participants become friends? Should they help those who fall behind? And what if victory becomes a curse?

User Review

A film adaptation of Stephen King's early novel about a totalitarian future in which young people representing different states participate in a militaristic competition called “The Long Walk.” They must keep walking at a steady pace until only one of them remains standing.

I run half marathons, and I know that everything in the body can fail—at my age of fifty. Sudden pain can pierce the knee. Muscles can soften so much that it is impossible to lean on the leg, or, conversely, they can twist in a spasm. You can bend down to tie your shoelace, your vision will darken, and it will be difficult to straighten up. You may be short of breath, your pulse may be racing, and somewhere behind you, a bus is slowly driving by, picking up runners who are moving too slowly. That's disqualification. So every time I hear that bus behind me, I run faster.
So it was physically difficult for me to watch The Long Walk — incidentally, on September 21, Stephen King's birthday and the day of the Moscow Marathon. I read the 1966 book of the same name, part of the thick collection The Bachman Books (novels written by King under the pseudonym Richard Bachman), back in the 90s, and it certainly stuck in my memory. It was an epoch-making collection in terms of cinema and foresight. “Rage” so accurately predicted future school shootings that King himself banned the reissue of this work. The Running Man received a legendary film adaptation starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (a remake is coming soon), Roadwork is still waiting for its moment, and The Long Walk, after a truly long walk of 59 years (!), is coming to the big screen. It's hard to say what year it is on screen — after all, in 1966, King couldn't write about cell phones, smart watches, or Internet broadcasts. But the plot about fifty young men trudging down the road at gunpoint... It's scary.

It's funny that just yesterday I watched Zemeckis' experimental film Here, shot entirely with a static camera. The Long Walk is the complete opposite of this approach. The camera moves with the characters, and we move with them in the same way—towards the end, you can actually feel the pain in your leg muscles. Thanks to the skill of the cinematographer and the precise acting of the actors, the action never slows down for a minute, delivering an emotional crescendo every 5-10 minutes. It's hard to surprise me on the big screen, but both scenes with the mother simply devastated me. The camera does not turn away from the most brutal or unpleasant moments (the characters literally have to relieve themselves on the go). With each passing day, stubble grows on the faces of the surviving characters, and in their eyes, the realization of the nightmare they have fallen into matures. And the scariest thing is that after the first deaths (yes, it's no secret that soldiers who walk slowly or stop are simply shot), the rest begin to treat the deaths of their rivals with increasing detachment — without turning around or even flinching.

It's hard to call this picture humanistic, but unlike in Battle Royale and Squid Game, the heroes manage to hold on to the idea that their main enemy is not the guy walking next to them, but the figure in khaki on the armored personnel carrier pointing a rifle at them. Yes, there are conflicts between the walkers, but the very fact that no one is deliberately trying to kill anyone is surprising. The character of the Major, played by Mark Hamill (I can still see his kind grandfather's mustache from the very recent King adaptation of “The Life of Chuck”), remains a stereotype — he is almost an abstraction, the embodiment of a militaristic machine that literally runs over the bodies of young people. On the other hand, Cooper Hoffman (No. 47), whose features subtly resemble those of his great father Philip Seymour Hoffman, and David Johnson (No. 23), memorable for his role as a multifaceted robot in Alien: Romulus, make up a surprisingly cohesive duo.

The denouement is all the more emotional. King is a unique storyteller, capable of creating interesting characters and skillfully twisting the plot, but his endings can be disappointing—as in The Stand or Under the Dome. The authors of his screen adaptations have a rare opportunity to improve the ending, as was the case in Cujo, Apt Pupil, and especially The Mist. I can't say with complete confidence that I like the ending in Francis Lawrence's version better than the original, but it did take me by surprise. And that's a valuable quality for any film adaptation.

The example of The Long Walk shows that sometimes good books have to wait a long time—too long—to be realized in all their glory on screen. But sometimes the wait is worth it. And even if the characters' journey is over, we continue on, each on our own long walk, carrying this experience with us.

Info Video

Codec: HEVC / H.265 (77.7 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10+
Aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1

Info Audio

#English: Dolby TrueHD with Dolby Atmos 7.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
#English: Dolby Digital Plus with Dolby Atmos 5.1
#Spanish (Latino): Dolby Digital 5.1
#French: Dolby Digital 5.1

Info Subtitles