Film reviews: The Long Walk | From Ground Zero: Stories from Gaza | The Golden Spurtle
Stephen King may have written his dystopian novel The Long Walk in the late 1960s, but its prophetic conception of America’s political lurch to the right makes this film version seem uncomfortably timely, writes Alistair Harkness
The Long Walk (15) ★★★★
From Ground Zero: Stories from Gaza (12A) ★★★★
The Golden Spurtle (PG) ★★
Stephen King wrote the source novel for dystopian sci-fi horror The Long Walk when he was still a college student in the late 1967, first publishing it in 1979 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Revolving around a deadly endurance race in which a fascist American government recruits teenage boys to compete against one another in a gruelling televised ordeal, it may well have been the fledgling novelist's poignant response to the escalating war in Vietnam, but its prophetic conception of America’s political lurch to the right makes this long-gestating film version seem uncomfortably timely.
Its bleak walk-or-die premise is certainly catnip for Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence. Casting a lot of purposely baby-faced Hollywood up-and-comers (Cooper Hoffman, Charlie Plummer and Ben Wang among them), he proceeds to capture the physical toll it takes on the participants in grisly detail and refuses to cut away from scenes of fallen teens being ruthlessly executed by the state if they fall below the three miles-per-hour pace set by the Long Walk’s militaristic figurehead, the Major (a gravel-voiced Mark Hamill).
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The film follows the group as whole as they’re gradually whittled down from 50, but it really takes shape around the excellent Hoffman, cast here as Ray Garrity, a teenager who’s accepted his fate for personal reasons he hasn’t fully thought through. He strikes up a friendship with fellow participant Peter McVries (David Johnson), whose hardscrabble life has given him a better understanding of world, and whose optimism in the face of relentless despair starts bonding the boys together, turning them into defiantly misshapen cogs determined to disrupt a machine intent on crushing the life out of everything that makes it worth living.
Produced by Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Mashwari, From Ground Zero: Stories from Gaza is an anthology film comprised of 22 short films about life lived under the intolerable conditions of the current conflict in Gaza. Mixing documentaries, video diaries, dramas, animation and more, all of it made against the backdrop of real death and destruction, it’s a remarkable testament to the power of creativity as a form of protest – not just against the war, but against the normalisation of the ongoing devastation.
Delving into the world of competitive porridge-making at the annual world championships in the Scottish Highlands town of Carrbridge, Australian filmmaker Constantine Costi’s The Golden Spurtle is thin gruel. Full of contrived efforts to ratchet up the quirk factor of both the locals who run it and the competitors who travel from all over the world to participate, it’s more mockumentary than documentary.
That’s too bad, because Costi has a decent focal point in the competition’s soon-to-retire chieftain Charlie Miller. Alas, the film’s desperation to be a “crowd pleaser” undercuts whatever value it might have had as a more nuanced exploration of the inner workings of a close-knit community.
All films in cinemas from 12 September
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