Way Back

Recently I happened to watch "The Way Back", a 2010 film by Peter Weir ("Master and Commander", "Dead Poets Society") starring Ed Harris and Colin Farrell. It tells the story of a group of prisoners who escaped from Siberian Gulag and walked all the way to India.
Movies about struggling to freedom seem to resonate well with almost everyone ("Shawshank Redemption" still being number one of Top 250 at imdb.com) but "The Way Back" isn't particulary involving. You don't get to know the characters very well and the escape itself is so brief and confuzing that you're stuck with thinking "this is it?". However, it appears that "The Way Back" is somewhat of a slow burner and it gets better when the long journey goes further. The viewer feels the hunger, exhaustion and mental stress of the ragged band of escapees as they reach China, only to find out that China too is taken by communism. Cold and merciless Siberia gets replaced by a vast dry desert and just surviving becomes a real test of strength and willpower.
Still, the whole movie seems like somewhat of a missed opportunity. It jumps impatiently from one sequence to another and doesn't ever really pay off. The characters remain foggy and their motivation for pushing themselves to the very limit makes little sense. The whole project might work well if it was all an epic true story that simply needs to be told but this is not the case. "The Way Back" is simply "inspired by" a tale of some guys who might have escaped Gulag at some point. As a work of fiction, the movie unfortunately doesn't hold water.
Yet, it's not a bad a movie. "The Way Back" is still a quite human story about survivalism and the crimes of Communism. Plus, Saoirse Ronan gives a strong performance and Colin Farrell tries to be a russian thug. That's something worth seeing I guess.

Saiko