Overview

• The film adapts King’s early novel, published under the Richard Bachman name, into a dystopian endurance walk in which only one participant survives.
• Reporting underscores deliberate departures from the book, including a lower required pace, a revised protagonist motivation, the removal of a romantic subplot, and a different ending approved by King.
• Hamill plays the authoritarian officer who runs the lethal event for roughly one hundred youths, enforcing rules that escalate from warnings to execution for falling behind.
• Early aggregator reactions on Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd, and IMDb are described as generally positive during the initial release window.
• The cast includes Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, and Charlie Plummer, with direction from the filmmaker known for The Hunger Games and I Am Legend.