The Way Back (2010)

Rating: 8/10 (24 March 2018)

The beginning of the film contains the most valuable and accurate historical depictions. In the first scenes, we are shown how family members were coerced into informing on their spouses, or parents, through means of torture. The gulag system not only tore apart families by physical distance, but through emotional trauma as well. The guilt of being responsible for a loved one's imprisonment is imaginably as tormenting as the gulags were.
The scenes that took place in the gulag showed the hostilities of Siberia's climate and the unforgiving nature of the criminal prisoners who ran the show much like the Kapos did in concentration camps. The film did well to highlight the different kinds of prisoners who ended up in the gulags, ranging from political prisoners, to convicts and even on the rare occasion, an American.
As the escaping group got further from the gulag, the film became more and more about surviving in the wild than about a significant historical event. Of course there were people who escaped and many who met their end in the surrounding wilderness. But the 4,000 mile walk depicted seems to have been an unique exception or perhaps an impossible dream at best. The journey, though, illustrates what is better than being in a gulag. They were willing to risk the unknown in the wilderness rather than stay and die in the gulag as prisoners. The escaping group took ownership of their lives back, and for some, their deaths too.
Purely as a film, it was a compelling story told in an engaging way. I appreciated the many different kinds of prisoners that had their characters expanded upon and a voice given too. Not often is a criminal prisoner seen as much more than a criminal, and I thought that Valka was a crucial character to the film.