‘The Long Walk’ Made Me Feel More Hopeful Than ‘Superman’ Did

Spoilers for The Long Walk and Superman lie ahead.

I rushed from the movie theater on Friday at 11:55 PM, asking as politely as possible for people not to block the escalator so I could get by and make it from 34th Street to 40th to catch a 12:10 bus and not have to wait for the one at 1 AM. My feet moved as quickly as they could, and I got on that bus at 12:04 and was shocked to see it leave at 12:06. Four whole minutes early! If I hadn’t busted my ass, I wouldn’t have made it.

That’s not as daring a walk as we see happen in The Long Walk, the new Stephen King adaptation directed by Francis Lawrence and written by JT Mollner. In the film, 50 male volunteers must walk at a pace of three miles per hour lest they be shot dead and removed from the “game.” The last one standing wins an undisclosed (but, allegedly, highly lucrative) payout and one wish.

Yes, I was heading for a bus and not trying to give my family a chance of survival while risking my own life in a foolish game, but that doesn’t make the film feel any less prescient. The world of The Long Walk is a United States that has crumbled after some war and now sends its citizens openly through a no-win situation for everyone’s entertainment. It’s bleak as hell.

I also saw Superman this summer. While I didn’t rush from the theater for that film, I did rush to it. I had just gotten out of seeing Weird Al in concert with my family. My wife and kids were exhausted, so they went right to bed. I hurried to the theater to catch one of my favorite heroes, adapted by one of my favorite directors. It was a great time, and I was truly impressed by how relevant it felt.

Times are hard, y’all. Things feel desperate and scary. It would be great if some big, smiling, good representation of humanity would take charge and inspire folks to do the right thing. That’s what happens in Superman. While we don’t really see why people weren’t standing up in the first place, Superman’s selflessness inspires them to take a stand.

That said, we still see some ugliness in the face of that inspiration. At one moment, Metamorpho, a hero who can change his body to any element he can think of, decides to help Superman after he witnesses someone murdered in cold blood by Lex Luthor. This happens in an inter-dimensional prison, and while he’s helping, other prisoners try to rat him out. They’d rather he not rock the boat, so as not to make things worse, and he does anyway.

I expected The Long Walk to be riddled with moments like this. Surely, in a movie about a mostly unwinnable contest for which the stakes are life and death, people would be turning on each other left and right. They would stop their fellow contestants from succeeding, so they would succeed. That isn’t the case. Not only do they try to work together, but some of them also become friends.

Aspects of their friendships feel pointless, but what else do they have? Also, there are exceptions. One character viciously taunts another and eventually gets him killed, but then breaks down when he is rightfully ostracized for his actions. Later on, the last remaining characters vow not to help each other any longer, and they can’t even stick to that. They end up helping each other until the very end. It is tragically beautiful.

Superman and The Long Walk are very different movies, but where one was meant to lift me up, it ended up bringing me down. There is no Superman in the real world who will inspire change. Yes, there are inspirational people, but the ability to make folks do the right thing at the drop of a hat feels much more like a superpower than something a real person is capable of. If anything, real people more easily inspire violence and hatred.

The Long Walk presents a world that is also not real but feels similar enough to our own in a way that is easier to glean hope from. At one point, when there are, like, 15 people left walking, they band together to yell chants of “f*** the Major” and “f*** the Long Walk,” protesting against the thing they “volunteered” for, and it felt invigorating and inspiring. Futile? Maybe. But what else can they do?

No one knows how we will get through the years ahead. Ideally, they won’t be as brutal as The Long Walk suggests. But a man in a big blue suit isn’t going to swoop in and save us. We get through this by working and sticking together until the very end. We make friends. We talk to and understand each other. In the face of overwhelming odds, we put our arms around each other and throw up a few middle fingers. We may not win, but we will not be broken down.