“The Long Walk” - Walk it off.

By sheer coincidence, I attended a screening of The Long Walk just two days after walking around Disney World for three days. If you have never been to Disney World, I can assure you that however much you think people walk there, you are vastly underestimating. As luck would have it, I know approximately how far I walked because both my wife and our friend wore fitness watches counting our steps.

I figured the final tally would be somewhere around ten miles over those three days, fifteen miles tops. I wasn’t even close. Turns out it was a literal marathon, somewhere between twenty-six and thirty miles (more than 59,000 steps). Now, imagine doing more than ten times that, but with no breaks. That’s what the contestants do in The Long Walk.

My recent experience is only a fraction of The Long Walk, but it’s a useful starting point. After my first day of walking roughly twelve miles, my legs were dead tired, my calves were sore, my back was stiff and achy, I was dehydrated, and I was developing blisters on both of my little toes. I did what I could the next two days to avoid worse blisters and pulled muscles. On the flip side, all that walking was constantly interrupted by standing in line for rides, riding those rides, standing in line for food like Mickey pretzels, and sitting down to eat those pretzels. Don’t worry - I’m not looking for pity. I know where I was.

In other words, I have an inkling of what the The Long Walk might feel like. However, unlike the characters in The Long Walk, I didn’t have to maintain a three-mile-per-hour walking pace. I didn’t get warnings for slowing down (they get a maximum of three but can erase a warning for every hour they go without an additional warning). I didn’t have to try to sleep while walking. Or poop while walking. And I certainly didn’t have to cope with anyone in my group being gunned down because they ran out of warnings and slowed down again. Even in Florida.

On the positive side, like the characters in The Long Walk, I shared the experience with friends (and family). Being able to talk to people is a great distraction from the monotony of walking miles upon miles. In the film, there are several characters that get plenty of screentime, the two most prominent being Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman) and Peter McVries (David Jonsson). The two form a bond just before the walk begins, eventually leaning on each other through the walk like brothers, if not lovers. Complimenting these two are Arthur Baker (Tut Nyuot) and Hank Olson (Ben Wang), forming a friend group that easily makes the viewer forget the walking for several lengths of time.

It's not all high-fives and bro-hugs, though. Stebbins (Garrett Wareing) and Gary Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer) are adversaries to Ray and Pete’s quartet, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call them villains. Stebbins is all but a machine and kind of a dick and Barkovitch is a loose cannon. Think of them as that squabbling family yelling at one screaming child while shoving a stroller haphazardly in the middle of the Epcot walkway. You silently curse at them, desperately willing them to park the stroller, shove a churro in the kid’s mouth, and get out of the way. Trigger-happy soldiers pacing us doesn’t seem like the worst idea at that point. Again, Florida.

When my Disney trip was over, I was quite satisfied, despite my blistered toes. I did not feel the same way when The Long Walk cut to credits. A little of that is my fault. I read the original Stephen King story (same title) thirty years ago and I’ve been waiting that long for an adaptation. Along the way, I think my memories of the story drifted a bit, along with my expectations for a film version. Don’t get me wrong, the film is decent. Good, even, if you really like character- and dialogue-driven stories where the tiny bit of action is mostly on the sidelines. Think Stand By Me, but without the leeches.

But most of my very mild disappointment is the movie hasn’t been updated for our times. As one person pointed out in a post-movie discussion panel, the story can be interpreted as an allegory of the Vietnam War. A platoon of conscripted young men on an endless walk, constantly in danger of being shot, and doing so for a very fuzzy reason. I understand historical dramas, but why make an exceptionally faithful adaptation of an allegory of something that happened fifty years ago whose commentary won’t even be recognized by anyone under the age of sixty?

I was also mildly disappointed that the film didn’t give us anyone to really root against. Stebbins and Barkovitch are developed such that they still inspire plenty of sympathy. The Major (Mark Hamill) responsible for conducting the Long Walk is a classic bully, but he’s really more of an idea of a bully; a voice from off-camera that inspires little more than an eyeroll as he barks military cliches at the walkers. And the crowds of people who line the streets in the book, hoping to glimpse death, are removed from the film altogether. So, when the final walker is eliminated, there isn’t much resolution because they didn’t really overcome anything. It’s just...done.

In other words, it’s one of those times when a film probably needed to wander a bit more from its source material. I don’t mean anything crazy like the 1987 The Running Man adaptation. But it could have leaned into a character or two hallucinating from sleep deprivation (not unlike me after 3 days at Disney), in addition to a little more villainization. Hamill wouldn’t have to go full Darth Vader, but a little more Jafar would have been nice. A bit more of the verbal psychological warfare to emphasize which of them really only cares about the prize awarded to the last man standing. And bringing the spectators back to emphasize how far the world around them had fallen. This would have given the end of the film much more weight and satisfied the audience. Even the ones who were just at the happiest place on Earth.

Rating: Ask for five dollars back or a Mickey pretzel.

“Alien: Romulus” - You just had to make it weird (or Alien Re-Resurrection).

How did you feel about Alien Resurrection? Did you like it, hate it, accept it as good enough to scratch your Alien itch? Did you refuse to watch it altogether? Were you even alive in 1997? Short of rewatching Resurrection, Alien: Romulus is the next closest thing. Depending on how you answered my questions, that’s good, bad, or you’re not even old enough to have worried about Y2K.

In Resurrection, a group of corporate scientists are studying captured xenomorphs (the aliens referenced by the title) aboard a ship. A ragtag group of humans and one obligatory android are also on board. When the xenomorphs escape and start killing, the group is chased around the ship and picked off by the xenomorphs one at a time, all while a final countdown to the ship’s destruction ensues. At the end, there is a climactic fight between the last remaining human(s) and some new hybrid xenomorph.

In Romulus, a group of corporate scientists were studying captured xenomorphs (the aliens referenced by the title) aboard a space station. A ragtag group of humans and one obligatory android end up on board. When the xenomorphs escape and start killing, the group is chased around the station and picked off by the xenomorphs one at a time, all while a final countdown to the station’s destruction ensues. At the end, there is a climactic fight between the last remaining human(s) and some new hybrid xenomorph.

There are differences, to be sure. Romulus takes place between the events of Alien and Aliens. There are fewer characters in Romulus and none of them are literally Sigourney Weaver or Weaver’s Ripley. But there is a Ripley-analogue - Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny), a young miner caring for her android/surrogate brother Andy (David Jonsson). Yes, the android’s actual name is Andy. Andy the Android. Yeah, I rolled my eyes, too.

And the way they end up on the doomed vessel is slightly different. Rain is approached by ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) with a plan to escape their dead-end lives and flee to another planet. The three of them and three others - Kay (Isabela Merced), Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Navarro (Aileen Wu) - form the group that will definitely not all survive to see that planet. Unfortunately, none of the human characters are developed that well, so we don’t have much rooting interest in any them. Rain is the obvious protagonist and we like her because she protects Andy. But Kay is pregnant, so...yeah. The other three barely get names and are just there as slasher movie fodder. As for Andy, we’re told he is an old model refurbished to the point of being little more than functional and mostly reduced to telling dad jokes. See the problem here? We need another Ripley - a very capable and skilled person with leadership qualities and a badass streak who won’t leave a child or cat behind. Instead, we get Rain, who is really good at rebooting Andy and knows not to inject people with black goo. That’s about it.

Speaking of black goo, how did you feel about Prometheus and the whole xenomorph origin story? I thought it was half-baked and completely unnecessary. It’s one thing to give us the tale of how Darth Vader came to be Darth Vader (still unnecessary). It’s another to give us the origin story of a wild animal. Imagine if someone made a prequel to The Meg explaining the origins of megalodons. It’s a scary monster that wants to kill people. Got it. I don’t need more. As Patton Oswalt once joked when talking about the Star Wars prequels, “I don’t care where the stuff I love came from. I just love the stuff I love.” To be clear, I do not love The Meg or anything about it. The point is when the goo made an appearance in Romulus, I rolled my eyes again. Hard.

(Spoilers - If you want to be truly surprised and grossed out in the movie, skip the next paragraph.)

That goo was a key component in writer/director Fede Alvarez’s vision for Romulus. He definitely saw Resurrection, but took the wrong lesson from it. He saw the bizarre human-hybrid and thought “you know what this really needs? Graphic body horror.” Remember that pregnant girl I mentioned? She has one job in this movie - to give birth to that hybrid. And it’s a scene you can’t unsee. I realize that watching one of the chest-bursters explode through a rib cage is quite awful to watch, but watching one of the xenomorph eggs come blasting out from between that girl’s legs in an explosion of blood is over the top for me. Not because labor and delivery bothers me - I watched my son’s birth and it was super cool - but because it’s in the movie just for the gratuitous shock value. It’s also the point where the movie lost me, not just because of the gross-out factor, but because of the continued tie-in to Prometheus. I didn’t know it was possible to roll your eyes while trying not to vomit.

With that scene seared into my brain, followed by the silly hybrid and final fight scene, I was less than thrilled by the overall film. Don’t get me wrong, the movie prior to the pregnant girl’s big scene was very solid. It did what we want all Alien movies to do. It put a group of people in an enclosed space being chased by the scariest creature in movie history. It gave us another really good android character who garners more sympathy than the rest of the cast combined (not to mention Andy gets an upgrade for part of the movie that allows Jonsson to steal the show). It even did some creative things with the face huggers and acid blood to lift the tension. But Alvarez just had to make it weird.

Rating: Ask for four dollars back and a barf bag.