The Way Back

The Way Back (2010) begins in a Siberian labour camp in 1940. Seven prisoners escape and start walking south. The route runs from Lake Baikal into Mongolia, across the Gobi, over the Himalayas and into India, thousands of kilometres on foot. Peter Weir directed, his first film after Master and Commander, with seven years between them. The source is Sławomir Rawicz's book The Long Walk. The book itself is a problem: Rawicz presented it as his own experience, but Soviet documents that later surfaced show he was released under an amnesty in 1942. The film's opening is therefore carefully worded, and Weir presents the story not as documented fact but as an account of a walk that happened. Jim Sturgess, Colin Farrell, Ed Harris and Saoirse Ronan are in the cast. It was shot in Bulgaria, Morocco and India, and all its power is in the locations; the landscapes are not digital. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Makeup. It runs 133 minutes. Good for: survival narratives, landscape cinema, and Peter Weir. Less good for: the truth of the book is contested and the film does not make that clear enough. Most of the characters are hard to tell apart, the narrative repeats as the walk lengthens, and the emotional connection stays thin.