I love Peter Weir, his films always seem to have the most infectious characters, a relatable ‘human’ story, and are usually visually mind blowing. Those people who gave their time to really appreciate the grand scale of master and commander, it’s awesome performances from Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany, and the awe inspiring photography, ‘The Way Back’ could become a really important movie in your life for years to come. With equal quality performances from the whole cast, the named actors Ed Harris, Jim Sturgess, and to some extent Colin Farrel and Mark Strong genuinely shine in these roles. It felt effortless to watch them play here, I believe they all had a deep empathy for the real life story and the people involved that they are portraying onscreen. This is an epic movie of huge scale and beauty.
Peter Weir and Russell Boyd his cinematographer captured some of the most incredible natural beauty our planet has to offer for this movie, from the seemingly infinite snow covered wilderness of Siberia, the barren expanse of the Mongolian desert, to the awe-inspiring vistas of the Himalayas. It truly is a phenomenal looking movie, and I highly recommend a blu ray watch for this, although I saw it on DVD and it still looked amazing. I have no idea how this film was really captured visually, but it felt very natural. Like the use of the sun, the night sky, the color of the landscape, and carefully controlling the times of day that shooting took place in order to make everything look just perfect. Obviously in darker interior-ish scenes confined to smaller areas they would possibly have a more conventional approach to lighting, but 90% of this movie is shot outside, and based around the lack of control of the elements, Weir & Boyd really must’ve used their cameras to simply capture the earth’s beauty in such a non-synthetic manner. I really do plan on visiting the extras for this one, I have too many questions!
The Way Back is the story of escapees from a Russian gulag in Siberia and how they walked 4000 miles to freedom in India during the dark days of World War 2. Now this isn’t an action movie in its regular sense, but there are plenty of events taking place that can engage you just as much as a gun fight. How tense can it be to watch a bunch of people running over a thinly ice covered lake? If you understand the consequences of falling in, and understand the people in involved, the characters, yeah it’s pretty tense. And the movie has many of these moments. It isn’t an ever going battle against machine gun wielding Nazis that threaten to take your life, it’s a battle against the cold, against the heat, against hunger, thirst, disease and infection, and probably it’s most poignant aspect, the fragility of the human mind.
How this film manages to switch between its different environments, ultimately it’s “over tone” is nothing short of incredible as far as I’m concerned. One minute you’re watching the escapes fighting to survive in Siberia in deathly low temperatures, an hour later, you’re with them in the desert with no water, the power of the sun and extreme heat battering their bodies like meat on a grill. I cannot emphasize how well this is portrayed, even if you think it’s kind of impossible to tell the story of a perilous 4000 mile walk through some of the earth’s harshest environments with any degree of scale and sense of distance, The movie is constructed in such a way that never lets up, every minute of film you see has something valuable to tell you, it doesn’t waste any of its time, it never slows down, they squeeze every second out of this 2 and a half hour epic to really give us that necessary sense of how crazy and long this walk to safety is.
Initially they wanted to go to Mongolia, but upon arrival they find that the communists have taken over, so in an instant, their journey becomes twice as long as they decide their only safe destination is India. After an hour in Siberia, and the thousands of miles walking through the snow, followed by the major and skillfully executed transition to the barren desert, our characters all but beaten by this feat of pure courage and determination face their final obstacle en-route to their destination. The Himalayas. I swear that we see such an elegantly shot Mount Everest as the back drop to the tiny silhouettes of our journey men. I can’t be sure, but I think the composition of the shot and the fact that this mountain was infinitely taller than all those surrounding it, it must have been Everest, either way, it looked amazing.
At the beginning of the movie, the Russian captors in the Gulag inform the prisoners that the wire fences that surround them are not there to keep them in, it is their location keeping them in, escape is deemed virtually impossible due to the millions of square miles of Siberian wilderness surrounding them. They are also informed that all local villagers will try and kill anyone found seeking shelter with an automatic bounty being applied to anybody that escapes. I really like that this film didn’t even touch on this, it didn’t become a manhunt, sure they hid from a few groups of people, but this movie didn’t for one second need to rely on chasing and shooting for its engaging moments, it kept it all focused on the journey.
I know people have different tastes and opinions when it comes to art, but I would genuinely find it puzzling for anybody to not appreciate this movie. Filmatically it is exquisitely crafted, the characters are fantastic, almost like a group of misfits, a spy, a cook, a priest, an accountant, Ed Harris as a bad ass American, the beautiful photography, and a story so profound that you’d have to be A very apathetic individual to really not care for it.
