Just in time for the holidays, Stephen King’s bleak dystopian death match movie The Long Walk comes to 4K UHD for everyone, a month after the Amazon exlusive. This is good timing because the holidays can often feel like a slow march to inevitable destruction, but even in happy times it is a compelling, engaging adventure.
50 young men compete in a cross-country walk until only one of them is left. King wrote this in the ‘70s and I read it in the late ‘80s. As a horror-loving kid I imagined the walkers much older but I guess they were teenagers and the movie aged them up. And this is sci-fi that doesn’t need robots and spaceships, just people walking and walking and walking and walking.
The 4K UHD transfer highlights the landscape of America as the contestants move through location after location. The sky’s subtle transitions from morning to beating midday sun to dusk evoke the moods of the walkers talking to pass the time. Night scenes turn the sky into a pitch black void, and sometimes fill it with rain too.
Surround sound creates a subtly enveloping atmosphere too. The outdoor ambiance is cut with the military tanks rolling through. The Foley of footsteps throughout the 108-minute film must have been a chore but well worth the effort.
The movie changed the ending of the book but the home video release includes an alternate ending. They maintain the major change but alter the resolution somewhat. A closing text would have been a really weak way to end it so clearly the correct choice was made, but it’s still interesting.
The cast discusses their favorite Stephen King works, and you can see Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson perform one scene on Zoom, sitting down, compared to the finished scene in the film.
The behind-the-scenes “making of” documentary is a very thorough 75 minutes. They talk to the cast and filmmakers in studio during production. The level of detail really sells it. There’s a lot more CGI than I realized for a movie on location with people physically walking, but it’s mostly seamless.