Review of The Way Back (2011) by Sherry L — 24 Apr 2012

The first part of the movie impressed me a lot. There were lots of interesting characters and thrilling scenes, but after a while the movie turned out to something else and got a bit dull (in my opinion). Generally, I would call it more of an adventure movie an anything else (.

I guess I was a little bit disappointed that they were focusing so much on all the walking and walking over empty landscapes, and not enough on the actual escape and it's planning, or the intrigues among the characters in the camp. But after all, what did I think? The director is Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, Gallipoli, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show and Master and Commander), whose distinctions is to film overview landscapes whenever he sees his chance. Though, he is one of my...let's say 50, favorite directors, I can't say that the beautiful cinematography did much to this very compelling story.

Some scenes when they were wandering, just seemed like never ending. Let alone, that it must have been the exact feeling that the characters must have felt, but I was expecting that Peter Weir would have lift it more and made it a greater cinematic experience. Just to come up with an example of a film with a somewhat similar theme is the russian movie from 1977, The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye) which contains lots of scenes when the character is fighting for his life, as he is walking through snow storms and so on. And I cannot remember that The Ascent never felt "long" or "dull", so that's why I'm giving this movie only 60%, because I was expecting something more of the director.

The story (which is based on real events) is on the other hand, extremely interesting and I wish they would make more motion-movies about the prisoners in the gulag camps.

*Janusz (Jim Sturgess), is a polish citizen who has recently been sent to a gulag camp in Siberia after the gulag have been torturing his wife to make false accusations about him being hostile against Stalin. Realizing that he won't survive for long in the so called "work camp" (rather death camp), Janusz is planning to escape to the forest along with a few other prisoners. But the hardest thing is not to escape from the camp, but to survive in the cold forest, let alone to make it to any civilization.*.

I have nothing to criticize on the fact that most of the acting crew were "hollywood stars". it didn't bother me at all since I think the acting was performed in the most convincing way and you could tell that they had made lots of practicing in making the best russian accent possible (I wouldn't claim that the whole dialog would be in russian, even though some of it was).

Colin Farrell makes a surprisingly good performance as the killer convict Valka, and Ed Harris as the hard-bitten american who among a few others, accompany Janusz the long way from Siberia to India.

I recommend this movie mainly to people who enjoys the adventure genre!