The Way Back

"Nature is your jailor, and she has no mercy"

This Peter Weir film flew under the radar a bit. I know I tend to use this phrase a lot, but this film really seemed to make no impact anywhere. Perhaps this is because it covers a fairly obscure piece of history, doesn't really have any star power, and doesn't tell a straightforward story of good guys and bad guys. The bottom line is that this is an amazing true tale of survival that's been bankrolled by National Geographic (this in itself should give you a good idea of the subject matter). Peter Weir's longstanding reverence for atmospheric storytelling makes this story the perfect foil for his directorial idiosyncracies, and I highly recommend this film as a more realistic kind of adventure film for people who are sick of exploding cars and unrealistically 'heroic' characters.

The starting point for this film is a WWII-era Soviet concentration camp for political criminals. This brutal gulag is internally run by regular criminals (petty thieves, rapists and murderers... represented in this film by a very entertaining Colin Farrell). The camp has minimal security because the Siberian wilderness that surrounds it as practically impossible to traverse. And yet, a small group of political dissidents (including Ed Harris as a quietly tough-as-nails American) decide to try and make a break for it. The journey they face as they try to escape the world's largest country (on foot) is one of incredible scope and hardship.

I couldn't help but keep thinking: are these guys going to eat each other? I won't reveal the answer to that question but I will say that we know from the start that only three out of seven escapees will complete their epic journey across wilderness, desert and ice. There's no sugarcoating in this tale, but it isn't exactly exploitative either. It's just a bare kind of truth... the film does take an anti-communist stance of sorts but it doesn't feel like propaganda, this is just an amazing story that happened, it doesn't really have an agenda. It's more about courage and freedom than it is about injustice. By the time you get to the end you'll feel like you've almost literally taken this journey with the characters, it's a powerful finish and one that the viewer earns and deserves.

DIRECTOR: Peter Weir
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Keith Clark and Peter Weir, loosely based on real events.
KEY ACTORS: Ed Harris, Jim Sturgess, Colin Farrell, Saoirse Ronan, Gustaf Skarsgard, Mark Strong.

RELATED TEXTS
- The film is based on The Long Walk, a memoir by Slawomir Rawicz of his escape from a Siberian gulag. Rawicz's account has been discredited by others who claimed the story really happened to them instead. Nonetheless, the events did apparently take place, and a further book was written about verifying the story - Looking for Mr Smith: The Quest for the Truth Behind the Long Walk.
- Other films about survival in trying environments: Island in the Sky, Cast Away, Alive!, Into the Wild, Deliverance, Rescue Dawn, Van Diemen's Land and The Grey.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Makeup.