‘The Long Walk’: We walk still

“The Long Walk” is blood, gunshots, more blood and death. Over and over again. The film’s premise is simple: walk or die. But a muddy underfoot lurks beneath — a society impregnated by a draconian parasite that quickens the step, the heavy burden of memory that slows it and the call to brotherhood and home that stops it altogether.

Francis Lawrence (“Constantine”) is no stranger to shooting a dystopian landscape. He returns to the wastelands of “I Am Legend” and “The Hunger Games” in “The Long Walk,” achieving perhaps the grimmest adaptation of any Stephen King novel. First penned between 1966 and 1967, when King was only a freshman in college, “The Long Walk” sits within the context of the Vietnam War, a time when a military draft swept millions of young American men into the horrors o