The Way Back

The film's story has a rather unusual basis. It was derived from a book that was supposedly a description of a real event, a lengthy escape from a Siberian prison, but it has apparently since been established that it was fiction. So the film finds itself in the odd situation of not dramatising events in order to maintain respect for it's subject and suffering from a lack of characterisation and structure as a result, but without the actual authenticity that would have compensated for both.

It's essentially a lengthy account of how appallingly unpleasant subsistence survival is. One would assume that being the tale of a prison escape there would be a certain amount of tension drawn from the possibility of recapture, but they're only confronted with it once, and briefly. It instead concerns itself with the physical toll of walking a really, really long way with limited food and water.

And it's worth restating that it is largely physical. The characters begin with little depth (the exception being the one guy they left back in camp), and go through little in the way of development. They didn't respond to their plight in a way that made it anything other than a literal journey. Again, I think this is the fault of it's origins, as pure fiction has different rules. I would accept, had these been representing real people, that they had not undergone convenient narrative arcs and it would have changed the viewing to have known that these where the moments of real lives. Perhaps it would be best to have not known the truth going in. So, sorry about that, if you didn't already.

I concede that the tale itself is an interesting one even without external elements. It is beautifully shot and presented and the actors all do a fine job of conveying the hardships, and you do sympathise with the scale of the task that challenges them. I just didn't really see what I was gaining from the experience that would not have been present in a documentary fronted by Ray Mears and covering the similar terrain. Aside from a recipe for salty chicken.