LionsgateThere are so many series about dystopian death games that it almost seems like each new movie or show about a game where you win or you die feels the need to be even more elaborate than whatever came before it in order to stand out. Explosive bomb collars, complex arenas, breathless media coverage of the bloodshed, and twisted versions of Korean children's games are just some of the ways that series about deadly contests have upped the stakes to distinguish themselves from the competition. The crowded subgenre feels like a battle royale itself, and yet the best recent entry is a movie that does exactly the opposite of this trend increasing complexity. The Long Walk, a Stephen King adaptation released last year that hits HBO Max today, is about as mundane and straightforward fatal contests you could imagine — which is exactly why it's so effective.It makes a certain amount of sense that The Long Walk would be a simpler death game than Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, Squid Game, Escape Room, The Running Man, or any number of similarly deadly contests, because The Long Walk came before all of them. Writing under his pen name Richard Bachman, King published The Long Walk way back in 1979. (The Running Man, another Bachman novel that also got a film adaptation last year, was published in 1982.) While it's perhaps a stretch to say The Long Walk invented this subgenre, considering that gladiators were fighting in ancient Rome before the birth of Christ and other works like 1924's The Most Dangerous Game and the 1971 movie Punishment Park have similar themes, The Long Walk casts a long shadow. In a run-down, dystopian future America, young men participate in a contest in which there will only be one winner and every loser dies. It's a pitch that predates the YA lit craze that would make the Hunger Games such a sensation.Where The Long Walk differs from The Hunger Games and its ilk is that the contest is not an elaborate spectacle. Instead of fighting to the death or trying to avoid being killed by the sadistic gamemaster in bizarre, elaborate ways, the boys in The Long Walk are just walking. In the movie, directed by Francis Lawrence, there are 50 contestants. Their only goal is to walk at a brisk pace without stopping, slowing down, or leaving the road. If they can't keep up the pace, they die. There's no finish line; the contest isn't over until there's only one walker remaining. The grim mundanity of the competition extends to the enforcement. The walkers stroll on a completely ordinary road without tricks or traps, the walk isn't being filmed or broadcast to the nation, and when a walker is "eliminated" they don't explode because a surgically implanted bomb or collar detonates. One of the handful of armed guards slowly riding alongside the walk just shoots them with a normal gun.For audiences that are used to The Hunger Games — a franchise which will soon adapt the biggest titular contest when Sunrise on the Reaping comes out this fall, the lo-fi nature of The Long Walk's deadly competition might seem underwhelming. That's it? All they do is walk? They don't even fight one another? Exactly, and it's because there are no bells and whistles that The Long Walk is so upsetting.Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson, both of whom are exceptional in the movie, star as Ray Garraty and Pete McVries, the two walkers on whom the film mostly centers. They're friendly, and with not much else to do but keep putting one foot in front of another, the pair grow to like each other just as the film audience grows to like them. There's a sense of camaraderie between most of the walkers; they encourage one another and form friendships that seem straight out of another Stephen King work, Stand By Me, especially considering that the dilapidated nature of America in this dystopian future feels more like the 1950s than a futuristic Panem. Of course, the "lifelong" friendships the walkers forge are inherently short-lived. Only one walker is going to be alive when the contest ends, whenever that may be. Without the aggression a Battle Royale-style contest would demand of them, we can better understand the walkers' naivety and we feel even worse when the despairing reality of their situation catches up with them.Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson in The Long Walk. | LionsgateJust as there's no elaborate violence to distract from the contestants-turned-victims in The Long Walk, the nature of the contest is so mundane that audiences can't so easily write the deaths off. Bomb collars, an arena that throws new challenges at tributes every hour, and tug-of-war contests over a bottomless pit are made-up gimmicks that aren't part of real life; a simple, unfussy gunshot is sadly anything but. There's nothing to The Long Walk's contest that couldn't actually be replicated — and pretty easily. Naturally, this makes The Long Walk feel more "real" than some of its more elaborate death game peers.Stripped of the glitz, pomp, and audaciousness that allow most other deadly contests to find refuge in fiction, The Long Walk doesn't shy away from the unglamorous nature of death. It's tremendously upsetting in a way that feels important. The trick so many titles in this subgenre play is making their death games fun. The Long Walk isn't fun. It's bleak and pointless and sad, and the movie is almost a corrective to everything that came after King published the book nearly a half-century ago.The Long Walk is streaming on HBO Max.