Superficial Adjustments Made for Expediency
When adapting a novel, even one as succinct as The Lengthy Stroll, concessions to the brand new medium and the expectations that include them will naturally result in omissions, a condensing of occasions, and the compositing of characters. We don’t want to exhaustively checklist each such change made to the fabric, however we are able to spotlight a few of the extra noticeable ones proper right here.
Stephen King, for one, has already acknowledged a shift that his fixed readers picked up on within the trailers: within the novel, the Walkers are required to maintain at a pace of 4 miles-per-hour or quicker, in any other case they get a warning. Within the film, it was modified to a extra affordable tempo of at the least three miles-per-hour. In keeping with producer Roy Lee, King requested to make the change for the movie, stating, “There’s no manner you possibly can stroll 4 miles an hour for that lengthy.”
That appears a prudent realization, and one we think about the filmmakers have been already eying since having the characters dashing at a brisk stroll the entire film would make it harder to take care of the fraternal, and ultimately wistful, character conversations and tone.
Related adjustments embrace that within the novel there are 100 walkers chosen allegedly at random by a lottery—albeit then with a way more in depth screening and interview course of which measures the candidates by mysterious requirements. Within the film, it’s 50. Moreover, one little one represents every state within the U.S., whereas it was introduced as a fluke that Garraty was a neighborhood boy from the state of Maine the place the stroll begins. This clearly makes it simpler to have fewer characters—and extra reasonably priced to have fewer extras—in a story like this. It’s doubtless for a similar purpose that whereas the Walkers go crowds in almost each small city they undergo within the ebook, together with Freeport, Maine the place Garraty sees his mom, within the film it’s mentioned that no crowds are allowed.
In the identical vein, a number of of the tertiary Walkers are blended collectively. So whereas Ben Wang’s Mark Colson is each the braggart and unlikely younger married man among the many movie’s contestants, the ebook’s Mark has no spouse. Nonetheless, a personality named Scramm does—a little bit of a two-dimensional hillbilly sort with lacking enamel from the Midwest. Scramm can be probably the most outwardly athletic boy, and the oddsmakers in Vegas assume he’s the one to beat till he will get a chilly. Within the movie, the extra stealthily imposing Stebbins (Garrett Wareing) is each the plain frontrunner and the one felled by an unfortunate sickness.
There are a selection of different adjustments doubtless made for both time, price range, or medium constraints. There’s merely much less house in a two hour film for beats just like the bit early within the ebook of Olson psyching out the competitors, or a subplot about one of many boys’ mom (Percy, who doesn’t seem within the film) attempting to name out to her son from varied vantages on the aspect of the highway till the federal government arrests her. However such adjustments are the character of the beast.
