Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Roxie The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Cristal The movie really just wants to entertain people.

shakirtech Great movie i have ever seen .head off to real hero

bnair-14502 First of all, I just want to point out that this movie was extremely inspiring and one of the most inspiring movies I have ever seen. The fact that the need to get out of the Siberian Labor Camp, where the group of men were put, made them go on a voyage to India, which in my opinion was a death wish. The brutal weather conditions, the exhaustion, the constant walking, the tiredness, and the weight they had to carry to ensure they had necessary things to remain alive all played a role in the death wish they embarked on. These group of men were on a mission and their freedom and break away from communism was super important that they had to get as far away as possible, except for the one guy that decided to stay since he has been a communist all his life. Before being set upon their journey, the conditions at the Siberian Labor Camp were pretty accurate, in terms of how it seemed like it was every man for them self and the men there would trade their food rations or other items for clothing in order to keep warm, given the weather conditions. The shaving of heads was also another accurate portrayal that, believe it or not, was present in many other camps as well such as the Gulag and Nazi Concentration Camps. Overall, this movie was by far the best movie we have seen because it just goes to demonstrate the lengths that people are wiling to uptake just to get out of a camp and how much people really cared for the lives that they wanted to have.

anninapluff "The Way Back" is certainly a wonderfully shot film, with beautiful landscapes and does a great job capturing the daunting terrain. The men who escaped from the Soviet Gulag in Siberia certainly had a journey cut out for them. With that being said, there were certain positives and negatives about the film. One, it had a sound portrayal of Gulag life. From the very beginning you see how quickly time in the camp is turned to savagery. Rations are hoarded or traded or stolen. All that matters is survival, rather, your own survival. There is certainly a camp hierarchy in place with the "criminals" calling the shots. This was a useful tactic that the guards employed in order to create fear and order within the barracks. The hard labor of the camps was also depicted well in the film. The labor of the Gulag was an imperative aspect that came with many dangers for the men. Any one caught not doing their job would be shot. We see close moments such as these in the film, especially when Jim Sturgess' has a moment of hallucination and tries to walk out of the mine. Life was grueling and difficult, with few moments of hope. "Mister Smith," Ed Harris' character sums it up well later in the film: "In the camps some saw death as freedom." Despite some of these positive aspects, the overall journey left me in disbelief. The whole thing was like the ten biblical plagues. One thing after another, I was surprised they weren't all dead sooner. That being said, there are questions about the veracity of the story itself as even though the film is supposed to be based on a true story, the 1956 memoir that it is based upon is heavily disputed. Yet the purpose of the journey was not entirely lost on the film. For one it gave us a reflection of Soviet life that we didn't see in the Soviet Union through the scene with the destroyed Buddhist monastery. This was a reflection of what life would have been like in Soviet Russia as the monastery was completely destroyed and desolate. Churches were demolished and priests were shot and taken to camps. Under the communist regime religion was banned, yet another aspect people found solace in taken away. Overall the film showcased an immense amount of strength on the part of the escapees and the struggles of maintaining hope. An interesting story whether fact or fiction.

lmucha-44574 This film, which tells the semi-accurate story of gulag escapees, is beautifully filmed and does a nice job of depicting the basics of "gulag life," but the script, accents, and acting leave much to be desired. I found myself extremely bored - this film needed an editor. The plot is fairly basic - men escape the gulag and walk from Siberia to India. However, the script was dry and I did not find myself attached to any of the characters. Perhaps this is a personal opinion, but I do not understand why a director would cast a british actor and then ask them to speak in a Polish/Russian/Latvian/etc accent. If the viewer knows the character is from a specific country, why must we suffer through two hours of terrible accents. This is a frustrating element of the film. As for the acting, there is not much dialogue, but one can only make walking so interesting. The film's depiction of the gulag, a camp of little cinematic fame, is pretty accurate in terms of how people were interned, how long their sentences lasted, the psychological effects of the gulag, the social dynamics of the camp, and the terrible weather in Siberia. They only spend the first ten or fifteen minutes of the film in the actual camp, so I would not consider this a "camp film."