based on what?

Rating: 5/10 (28 October 2013)

This was a nicely shot film and a fairly compelling story. It does however get progressively more sappy and cliché as the film progresses culminating in a preposterous ending which veers widely from even the authors claims, which a quick visit to wikipedia, will show are exceedingly unlikely. Ranging from the reasons for the authors imprisonment, to the soviet records of the duration of that imprisonment and eventually the variance with which his documented history relates to his claims. There is a British officer somewhere who was stationed in India in the Second World War and claims he did record the emergence of three emaciated soldiers from Tibet who said they'd escaped from Siberia. It was almost certainly not the author of the 1955 book of the same title and we know nothing of the veracity or details of that journey.
The claim "based on real events" has been so abused at this point as to be meaningless from any Hollywood source.