The Long Walk of 2025 Spoilers

This year, I joined Raymond Garraty, Peter McVries, and more on The Long Walk. The Long Walk, based on Stephen King’s novel, takes place in a dystopian America where teenage boys compete in a deadly annual walking contest where they must continue moving or face execution until only one boy remains. Though I do not find myself in a nightmarish 1970’s America, the message of King’s story still rings true today. In 2025, the world values entertainment and spectacle despite the ongoing global anxieties, inequality, exploitation, and societal pressures, faced by many, primarily the young and underprivileged.

We may not have The Major bearing down on us and telling us to keep moving, but we feel it regardless. The extreme stakes of this deadly walking contest are just an exaggerated form of what we feel in our everyday lives. The desire to be on trend, make more money, become popular, have the newest technology, get more clicks.… It never ends. The invisible audience’s ever present eye is always upon us. We are faced with a never-ending stream of information and noise and I wonder if we were ever meant for so much clamor. It’s overwhelming. This is why I have made an effort to return to the offline hobbies that I adored as a child, like reading and playing video games. A book or a game offers an escape from the call of The Major. I am really valuing the quiet time away from the noise lately.

Much like Peter McVries in the film, we want to remain hopeful. All of the boys in the film begin the walk with a wish in mind, as they get to have one granted if they succeed. Pete reveals that he wants to use his wish to fix their world, one ruled by a totalitarian military regime. However, as the walk progresses the young men begin to lose that hope when faced with despair, loss, and their own mortality. At the end of the film, Pete fulfils Raymond’s wish of killing The Major rather than fixing the world. Despite this, it is through empathy, vulnerability, and friendship that Pete even makes it to the end. The same can be said about the real world. Sadly, empathy seems to be vanishing as the world sees each other more and more through the lens of the internet. It is much easier to view someone else through the barrier of the web as you can use it as a shield to say whatever you wish. But we are real and the words and choices matter. Despite the barrage of fear and falsities we see on social media, we must try to be optimistic.

The Long Walk features many harrowing and brutal moments as the physical toll of the long walk strikes the boys. If any of the contestants fall below the minimum walking speed of 3 miles per hour or stop walking they are offered three warnings before they are executed. We observe the road taking many of the boys: Curly due to a charley horse, Hank executed for fighting the soldiers, Barkovitch stabbing himself with a spoon, Collie shooting himself, and Art suffering an internal hemorrhage. The boy walking with the broken ankle was very hard to watch. He wanted to continue moving, crying and yelling through the pain as his ankle twists at an unnatural angle. Eventually, he could go no longer and the military executes him. Though we do not walk upon broken joints, the walk of many is dominated by mental health difficulties which can make it just as difficult to continue. As someone with my own difficulties, I too feel extra pressure as I take one step after another.

Through The Long Walk, we revisit a classic King horror which continues to be relevant in a contemporary context. We march down a long road, and our exhausted spirits want to pause, but we cannot. In the film, they walk because stopping means death, but in real life stopping means falling behind or upsetting someone or losing yourself. We are mere pawns in the larger competition of life. However, we must remember the humanist heart of King’s story as well. We must continue to seek light in the darkness, choose love in the face of hate, and break the systems of oppression and exploitation. The only way to succeed down the long road is to rely upon one another to keep going, to not let the sorrows of the world win.