Watch The Way Back For Free

People are voting emotionally.

Admirable film.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The film The Way Back is a thrilling story which details the escape of prisoners from a Soviet Gulag and the journey they must embark on in order reach a nation without communist sympathies. The opening of the movie was the strongest and most poignant part of the film as the first thirty minutes details the prisoners' experiences within the Gulag. The sequences in the Gulag make the viewer feel extremely claustrophobic, particularly during the scenes which take place in the mines, and creates an overall feeling of dread which causes the experience of viewing the film to feel more real. Moreover, the depictions of the day to day occurrences in Gulag are fairly accurate as the bartering systems displayed in the film and the prison social hierarchies were prominent features of life within a Soviet Gulag. The film was also able to explain how small infractions such as performing in a film could result in one's imprisonment within the Gulag. To improve the depiction of the Gulag from both a historic and emotional lens, the director, Peter Weir, could have taken more steps to make the death displayed within the Gulag more impactful for the viewer. Gulags were incredibly dangerous as about one in four prisoners in the Gulags died each year (Alexopoulos, "Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin's Gulag"). While the film shows that some prisoners died from exposure, all the prisoners who die within the camp are nameless Gulag prisoners. It would have been more impactful if one of the detainees who was planning on escaping the Gulag died before they were able to leave. Following the escape from the Gulag, the six prisoners embark on a journey with the goal of reaching Mongolia. The actual journey depicted within the film suffers from poor directing and screenwriting choices. Some parts of the journey depicted in the film such as when the escapees are traveling through China felt rushed whereas other aspects of the journey such as the initial trek through Russia could have been edited down. The strange depiction of time within the film prevented the viewer from having an accurate sense how long the journey took. Moreover, the survival aspects of the film such as the encounter with the sandstorm or the intense heat were not as interesting as the narratives the characters told about their experiences in the Soviet Union. The most disappointing part of the entire film was the ending which involved the leader of the prisoners, Janusz Wieszczek, reuniting with his after fifty years of separation. The ending seemed impossible even when compared to the almost impossible feat of traveling from Siberia to India. I would have preferred the film to end with the completion of the journey instead of the strange husband and wife reunion as it appeared to cheapen the quality of the film.

Peter Weir's The Way Back is a film chronicling a group of Gulag escapees' journey to freedom in India. While I found the film enjoyable and mostly accurate to the characteristics of the Soviet Union's Gulag camp system, I must acknowledge that the story's origin is a bit fuzzy. The film was based on a nonfiction book The Long Walk, which has been disputed. Although there are records of one or two groups of Gulag escapees turning up in India, the author of the book, who claimed to have accomplished this feat, did not actually escape a Gulag. While the origins of the story may not have been accurate, the depiction of the Gulag camp was accurate for the most part. For instance, Valka, the criminal character, had the authority in the barrack, which was true of most Gulags as guards tended to let criminals keep order. As was discussed in the film in the mining scene, heavy labor like mining work was fatal-it was just a matter of time before the inmate met their demise. Though comical, Valka's chest tattoo of Lenin and Stalin provides a good example of the blind loyalty to Stalin during World War II. Many inmates believed that their being in the Gulag was benefitting the regime and still held intense loyalty for the Communist government that had usually wrongly arrested them in the first place. Where this film fell short was showing how insanely fatal the Gulags were, especially in Siberia. Although we get a sense of the bitter conditions and their lethality in the scene where the guards allow the prisoners to take shelter in the forest away from the blizzard, I think that the film could have expanded upon how deadly a sentence to a camp like the one in The Way Back would have been.Straying from my discussion of historical accuracy, I must acknowledge that, as a viewer, the film seemed to drag on at points, especially as the group trekked across the desert. Despite this, when I think back on the film, I wonder if the long time in the desert was of some artistic significance. I wonder if Weir consciously chose to have the scene go on and on to mirror how the escapees kept walking and walking and never seemed to make much progress through the desert.

This great Movie sometimes feels like a National Geographic book that you enjoy from your seat Yes, the Characters do get some malnourishment , and some do die from the trek, but the lighting is made well the clothing the actors ware draws you in as a viewer to believe the place and time is relevant ,to say the least, and the escapees do bond enough to make it as a team, but there is, unrealistically, not enough conflict and Drama. It is all handled in such a delicate way, that it is too delicate for its own good. It is without much tension and it all plays out so gentile that the Movie is OK to watch but there is way too little to feel, what would make the movie better, is more conflict and more drama, they don't explain the other stories of the other escapees, like what happened to valka, and the other guys , its okay just wish it was more engaging

For you that doubt, grew up with my Grandparents. i was sent to live with them quite early in life, but I grew up with the stories. They licked ice off screws on the cattle carts on the way to Siberia for water. And yes, they went to British India via Mongolia and the story gets even more disturbing. Their crime? They were engineers...too intelligent to be allowed to live. Thank you for making this film and showing the horrors of Communism. I doubted it myself because of what the world tells us, I was wrong. There is no way on Earth this story is a fabrication, my Grandfather whom still lives does not even know of the internet...but I knew the story from 8+ in the late 80s. Thank you Britain for taking care of my Grandparents, thank you to the Indian people and thank you to the Persians. I will repay my debt to England, I owe you. And f*^& you Stalin and Lenin.