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(1/2011) Movie Review: The Way Back
4 Stars
Review By James R. Holland 
How’d You Like to Walk 4,000 Miles and Then Climb the Himalayas?
By the time the movie audience has sat through this PG-Rated, 133-minute action/drama based on a true story, they may be exhausted. The basic story is how six prisoners of Stalin’s Siberian Gulags escaped their prison in 1940. To complete their escape to freedom they had to traipse across most of Siberia and Mongolia in order to reach 
the safety of India.
Not only did the escapees battle winter (40 degrees below zero at night) in the wilderness, but all the local Siberians could earn a handsome bounty for returning the heads of each of the escaped political prisoners.
One of the joint producers of this motion picture is National Geographic Films. Apparently National Geographic is expanding its film making interests. That’s not surprising since the filming locations included Darjeeling, West Bengal, India, Erfoud, Morocco, Sofia Bulgaria, Quarzazate, Morocco, and Vakarel Bulgaria with some post production done in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
Given the extreme danger of this incredible journey by foot across Siberia, the Mongolian Desert and then the Himalayas, it naturally makes for a riveting adventure tale. Despite being more than two hours in length, the audience is captivated by the men and women struggling across the vast “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Dr. Zhivago” landscapes. The film might have been cut a bit, but nobody in the audience is going to want to leave the theater before they learn which of the six men and one teenage girl is able to complete the Marco Polo sized journey.
Director and co-screen writer Peter Weir does an excellent job of maintaining the suspense for this long journey without allowing it to regress into a simple travelogue. Slavomir Rawicz wrote the novel The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek To Freedom. Keith R. Clarke was the co-writer of the script. Most of it is in English, but because of all the foreign languages, there are a lot of subtitles but they don’t interfere with the story. The audience won’t remember what part of the dialogue was in English, Polish, Russian, Mongolia, etc.
It helps that the cast is excellent. Ed Harris plays the American Mr. Smith. Colin Farrell plays the tattooed Russian criminal Valka who is also one of the escapees. Saoirse Ronan plays Irena the Polish teenager who is also an escapee and joins up with the other escaping prisoners. The actress celebrated her sixteenth birthday during the film’s shooting.
In addition to the actual excitement of the dangerous escape, the movie will remind the audience what is was like for the Polish people during World War II. Stalin and Hitler had split Poland down the middle and the actual Polish population was practically exterminated by both the conquering armies. It will also provide the Baby Boomers Generation and their children a primer of what Communism and Joseph Stalin was really like. It’s no wonder the motion picture was not filmed in the actual locations of the prison camps. Communism and Stalin’s gulags were both Hell on Earth.
James R. Holland is a film editor, producer, and author–most recently of Adventure Photographer (A Bit of Boston Books/ 2009). He reviews movies exclusively for Basil & Spice. Visit James R. Holland’s Writer’s Page.
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