The Long Walk (2025)
Directed by Francis Lawrence

Back to the Future has no right to be as good as it is. On the face of it, it’s quite a basic concept – guy goes back in time, meets his parents, exacts some vigilante justice, has a few laughs, returns – it’s fun. But it represents perhaps the apex of the Saturday afternoon family comedy genre. As a child of the 80s, suffering with 4 TV channels, little in the way of accessible video games, and no internet I faced a stark choice: Either undertake outside activities or watch whatever the hell was on TV. It was a bleak time no matter what Stranger Things would have you believe. Usually if you weren’t prepared to endure hours of snooker on Grandstand there might have been a rerun of a sepia toned Western or a Carry On film or something else formulaic but if you were lucky there was the “what if your dog could talk? What if your dog got really big? What if your dog was a cop?” type of affair starring a wise-cracking kid who had big hair and a comedian in the twilight of their career. In other words a “movie” in the truest sense of the word. No black and white, no pretensions of art or socially commentary, just (almost certainly problematic) fun straight in to your eyeballs. I can’t recall whether Amblin pioneered this genre or the other way round, and it doesn’t really matter, since they captured it in its purest essence. 

Except of course, there is a lie in the above account. Because nothing laid bare the contradictions in the 70s and 80s as these supposedly “uncontroversial” movies. They told stories of a complete change in the expectations of young people from being “seen and not heard” to being independent and heroic and if anything of greater moral fibre than their compromised and career-focussed/divorced parents. The bad guys were some combination of Central European, Hispanic, dog-hating, or feminine coded in some way and all acting with impunity to threaten suburban America while the police stood idly by (unless the cop was a dog or Steve Guttenberg). 

These films were not even necessarily conservative in their outlook, but they knew they had to strike a balance between their young, adventure loving audience, and their Reagan-voting parents. ET is the typical example: white kid meets an alien, knows not to trust authority and hilarity ensues. Things only get really bad when the Government shows up to ruin everything. The kid and his rag tag band of friends summon their will to power to resolve the situation and learn a valuable lesson about family along the way. The Karate Kid, and Home Alone are other examples of the template and there are many more. 

So back to Back to the Future, a film which taunted America’s 1950s nostalgia with a terrifyingly confident and competent modern kid who played heavy metal guitar, hung on to the back of cars with his skateboard, and was comfortable with technology. Marty McFly is here to demonstrate that while the youth might be accused of being “slackers” they are the ones rising above disappointing parents who far from representing the assured spirit of the 1950s, were traumatised by its mainstream culture of bullying and sexual assault. With impeachable charm Back to the Future skilfully and mercilessly slid a knife into the sacred cow of Americana and left it there as people stepped over its twitching corpse, before the Simpsons arrived to bury it once and for all. 

Which brings us (finally) to the Long Walk: a film that fits quite nicely into the Saturday afternoon movie drama with its cocky teenage rebellion, straightforward plot with an important lesson about friendship, wisecracking comraderie and cackling authoritarian bad guy. A film that is really fun, and whose superficial social commentary is so on the nose it might as well be meaningless. In this instance I use “superficial” provocatively because I don’t think the film itself is shallow at all. The plot, angled presumably to liberal Democrat’s who see reading the New York Times as their strongest act of rebellion, and who oppose every war except the current war, is not subtle in the least, but serves as more of a necessary thin curtain over something more interesting. 

What struck me about the Long Walk is that unlike other dystopias it rarely dwells on a lost golden era, except from the point of view of the bad guy who mumbles something to the effect of making America great again. Instead the young people in this movie have only ever known bad times and are only looking forward. Anything, even death, is better than what they had before and what they have to hope for. The heartland America they walk through looks like the product of the Great Depression, barren and uninteresting and where any beauty in the frame is that of stark desolation rather than something sculpted by human hands. And through this landscape all we see is the brutal repression of youth, of solidarity, of going off the directed path, of any sign of weakness. 

Perhaps this is the same desolate America Chloe Zhao was trying to show us in Nomadland but she made the mistake of making her film fucking boring and with characters (no shade to Frances McDormand) who no one cared about or wanted to watch. 

Very sensibly the director of the Long Walk cast David Jonsson and Cooper Hoffman, who are both so hilariously charismatic that it completely makes sense that they become best friends prepared to die for each other in less than a week. It’s rare to see the concept of love at first sight so well portrayed, but it’s vital for the structure of the entire movie which would have only otherwise made sense if one of the characters was a large talking dog. 

The idea of comfortable 1950s America or even 1980s America is so far in the rear view mirror for these film makers that even if they try to show it, just seems like a sick joke. You don’t need CGI or Robocop-style adverts to give a glimpse of the relentless sprint towards hell. You don’t need artfully composed lingering wide shots of dusty tundra, you just need to show some people walk in the foreground while Mark Hamill sneers from the side and the audiences brains just fill in the few remaining gaps. Instead the film separates the hopelessness of America from Americans themselves, not least by sensibly casting a Londoner as the “best” American. 

Of course, while the idea of walking for a long time might fill Americans with cosmic horror-like dread, as a Londoner myself my instinctive response was “I reckon I’d be alright”. After years relying on public transport I’m used to being constantly on my feet, not having anywhere to go to the toilet, and having others wish for my brutal execution if I so much as break my stride to go through the ticket barrier. So I for one would heartily welcome our pedestrian overlords.