Kurt Loder writing in Reason Magazine:
If you’re going to base a movie on an amazing true story, it would seem essential that the amazing story actually be true. This is unfortunately not the case with The Way Back. Not entirely, anyway. The picture is drawn from a 1956 book by Slawomir Rawicz, a Polish army officer who claimed to have escaped from a Soviet labor camp in 1940, along with six fellow prisoners, and walked 4000 miles to freedom through Mongolia and Tibet and over the Himalayas to British India.
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Subsequent research has indicated that while Rawicz was a prisoner in a Siberian camp, he never took part in the hellacious trek his book describes. On the other hand, it does appear possible that another group of escapees did make this amazing journey, and that Rawicz, who died in 2004, might simply have been recounting their ordeal.
In the film’s production notes, director Peter Weir acknowledges the ambiguity of this tale, but says that while Rawicz’s book may not be completely true, it is probably accurate in its harrowing details, and in any case constitutes a great adventure. I think we can accept this reasoning. And the movie, which is very well-made, has much to recommend it. Working with cinematographer Russell Boyd (who also shot Weir’s Master and Commander and The Year of Living Dangerously), the director leads us through some extraordinary environments, from the frozen forests of Siberia (actually Bulgaria) to the vast parched expanse of the Gobi Desert (actually Morocco). He also draws fine performances from the stars portraying three of the fugitives…
Read the full review here.
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