‘The Long Walk’ more like the long talk, with grisly violence thrown in

“The Long Walk” — 2 stars

The movie “The Long Walk” is based on the first novel Stephen King ever wrote, while he was still a freshman at the University of Maine in the late 1960s. Though it would not come out until 1979, after “Carrie,” “The Shining” and other better-known titles, King’s earliest toe-dipping into dystopian horror was widely perceived as an allegory of the senselessness of the Vietnam War.

The story focuses on an annual Hunger Games-like competition: a march to the death in which young men and teenage boys walk, nonstop, until there is only one winner left standing. Losers — anyone who falls below a minimum pace — get summarily shot in the head after three warnings by soldiers monitoring their progress.

So it makes a kind of sense to hand the directing duties to Francis Lawrence, who already helmed four “Hunger Games” sequels with aplomb and who is directing a fifth, “Sunrise on the Reaping,” due out next fall. But there’s only so much one can do with the source material.

Where the “Hunger Games” franchise — both the books and the films — is an exercise in maximalist world-building, King’s book is on the minimalist side and, for better or worse, leaves much to the imagination. So does the new film, even though it covers more than 300 miles and five days.

Screenwriter JT Mollner (“Strange Darling”) has adapted the novel for the screen, reducing the number of contestants from 100 to 50: one male volunteer, selected by lottery, from each state. And though a reference is made to an earlier war that “tore apart” America — whether civil or global, it isn’t specified — the precise time period is left deliberately vague.

The film’s handsome desaturated palette (courtesy of cinematographer Jo Willems and production designer Nicolas Lepage) evokes the washed-out khakis and olive drabs of a faded Polaroid pulled out of a shoebox, with the rare splash of color limited to the pinkish plumes of blood and brain matter that accompany each execution. It’s effectively shocking and horrific in its brutality.

Technology is restricted to digital devices that track each contestant’s speed — they look like Casio wristwatches — and the odd transistor radio or Instamatic film camera carried by one or two walkers. A single, bare-bones TV camera lens pokes out of the back of one of the Army trucks chugging along the otherwise empty highway in Louisiana, where the film is set. If the action takes place in our future, it’s as if this unspecified war has kicked the country back into the 1970s.

Unlike in the “Hunger Games” movies, there are no elaborate production values, sponsors or commercials to this reality TV show, which seems to have little propaganda value. How the contest is intended to restore what is described as the struggling American economy — let alone give viewers a sense of hope, as the overseer of the walk, identified only as the Major (a cartoonish Mark Hamill), declares — is a mystery.

You might think this question would come up at some point along the walk. The participants have little to do besides chat with one another about life and death, and, in some cases, to taunt one another. That’s in hope of gaining a psychological advantage in the head game that plays out simultaneously to the more lethal one.

The film’s hero is Ray (Cooper Hoffman), a plucky kid with a hidden agenda who quickly bonds with an oddly cheerful fellow walker named Pete (David Jonsson) and two other Pollyannas: Hank (Ben Wang) and Arthur (Tut Nyuot). Together, this clutch of perverse optimists call themselves the Four Musketeers.

Making friends seems like a bad idea here, given the morbid circumstances. On the one hand, a buddy might improve your short-term odds of survival when the inevitable speed bump arrives: cramps, allergies, a dropped ration, an untied shoelace. On the other hand, there can be only one winner.

That existential paradox — are we all in this thing called life together, or is it every man for himself? — gives the film and its protagonists something meaty to chew on as it, and they, progress. But “The Long Walk” doesn’t dig into it in any deeply satisfying way.

After a recent screening of the film for press and other guests, Paul Cote, a film studies professor at the University of Maryland, led an audience discussion during which one viewer expressed the opinion that the movie’s ending — a violent departure from the more ambiguous book — went too far. Another thought the violence didn’t go far enough. The divide seemed strange. Even the conversation itself, an academic analysis of a horror film, seemed odd.

But maybe it wasn’t. In the movie, Ray and Pete posit that life isn’t about the endgame, but about the moments leading up to it. So what are we left with? One protracted stretch of philosophical jawboning, punctuated by moments of startling savagery. “The Long Walk”? “The Long Talk” is more like it.

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In theaters. Rated R for strong bloody violence, grisly images, suicide, pervasive crude language and sexual references. 108 minutes.