Friday Night Movie Review: The Way Back

The Way Back
PG-13 | 2h 13min | Adventure, Drama, History | 21 January 2011 (USA)
Director: Peter Weir
Writers: Slavomir Rawicz (novel), Peter Weir (screenplay)
Stars: Jim Sturgess, Ed Harris, Colin Farrell

The Way Back is a 2011 movie about a daring escape from a Siberian labor camp in 1939.

Denounced by his wife as a possible spy, Janusz (Jim Sturgess) finds himself in a remote Siberian labor camp. Faced with brutal conditions inside and out, Janusz is determined to escape.

A blizzard provides him with the perfect opportunity, and he and a small group of fellow prisoners make a break for it. Escape, however, is the easy part, for Janusz and his companions face a 4,000-mile trek on foot through the frozen Himalayas before they can truly be free.

The Way Back is an epic, exquisitely shot, and harrowing adventure about survival and the pursuit of freedom.

dvc5159 – IMDb member

Storyline

In 1941, three men attempt to flee communist Russia, escaping a Siberian gulag. This movie tells their story and that of four others who escaped with them and a teenage girl, Irena Zielinska (Saoirse Ronan), who joins them in flight.

The group’s natural leader is Janusz Weiszczek (Jim Sturgess), a Pole condemned by accusations secured by torturing his wife, spent much of his youth outdoors, and knows how to live in the wild.

They escape under cover of a snowstorm: cynical American Mr. Smith (Ed Harris), Russian thug Valka (Colin Farrell), comedic accountant Zoran (Dragos Bucur), pastry chef Tomasz Horodinsky (Alexandru Potocean), who draws, Priest Andrejs Voss (Gustav Skarsgård), and Polish Kazik (Sebastian Urzendowsky), who suffers from night blindness.

They face freezing nights, lack of food and water, mosquitoes, an endless desert, the Himalayas, as well as many moral and ethical dilemmas throughout the journey towards freedom.