The Long Walk; digging deeper

     Hello everyone! I have contemplated restarting this blog for a while because I really do love analyzing movies and I wanted to continue. I also really like some of the blog posts I have made here so I have decided to continue it here!

So my friend asked to see it, I was down because it sounded cool. So, I had not seen any of the marketing, I feel like if I saw that I maybe would have had a better idea about what it was about, but honestly I feel like watching movies without knowing the premise is really fun and I gives a more genuine reactions to it. 

What I did know 

I have watched a Stephan King film before, and I know his style. They usually are more psychological thriller and they also are typically a little unhinged. This is usually what I do like about his films, I enjoy being able to wonder, and dig deeper.

The review!

This movie is basically a bunch of guys walking, at its bare bones. I have seen movies like this before, where the setting is the same for the entire movie, and the bulk of the action is the dialogue that happens between the characters. I will say that out of all the movies that I have watched with this same premise, this is probably the best one. Some movies I feel that are similar is Malcom and Marie, The Goatlife (Indian movie), and The Incident (Martin Sheen) which is based of the Piliavin study. 

This is also an elimination based film, similar to Hunger Games, and Squid games, except this is much more simple. With the others, there are much more aspects to the movie other than the game. But this most literally was the entire movie. 

This guy at the movie theater was talking about how different the movie was from the book, so I just wanted to preface that I am just going based off what I watched. 

To start, The use of numb wording represents a lot in this film, It sort of takes place in the dystopian world post war, and this “long walk” is a marketing way to get the rest of the world to work hard. The entire walk is supposedly filmed for the whole world to see, but they did not really show any evidence of that until the very very end. This gave such an isolating feeling throughout the movie, and all the characters in the film we meet at the beginning, and we learn more and more as the movie goes on. We used to watch a lot of these types of movies in sociology class in high school, and I really enjoyed them. As I write these more often, I think I am going to develop a better way of organizing these reviews, but for now, it may be all over the place, so bear with me.

The wording

I do feel like a very common occurrence in Dystopian films is the use of euphenistic wording to create an emotional distance from what is truly occurring. Some examples of this that I noted was the use of “getting a ticket” which basically translates to getting killed. Not seeing any of the marketing, I genuinely didn’t really know what it meant until the first person died. They also used the word "warnings" which essentially means that you are one step closer to being killed. Whereas warning in normal context is a rule violation, like in school, home, or work settings.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed this movie. It was not lifechanging, but it did a good job of putting things into perspective, and getting a message across. Stephan King definitely has a twisted way of conveying these messages on film, but I do appreciate the slow buildup and sort of monotonous nature of his films, meaning they are all shot basically in the same way, doing the same thing, with some changes to the surroundings. In this case, a bunch of men walking, slowly breaking down and succumbing to the surroundings.