Implausible Nature Film full of Gulag

Rating: 5/10 (23 March 2018)

This film, which tells the semi-accurate story of gulag escapees, is beautifully filmed and does a nice job of depicting the basics of "gulag life," but the script, accents, and acting leave much to be desired. I found myself extremely bored - this film needed an editor. The plot is fairly basic - men escape the gulag and walk from Siberia to India. However, the script was dry and I did not find myself attached to any of the characters. Perhaps this is a personal opinion, but I do not understand why a director would cast a british actor and then ask them to speak in a Polish/Russian/Latvian/etc accent. If the viewer knows the character is from a specific country, why must we suffer through two hours of terrible accents. This is a frustrating element of the film. As for the acting, there is not much dialogue, but one can only make walking so interesting. The film's depiction of the gulag, a camp of little cinematic fame, is pretty accurate in terms of how people were interned, how long their sentences lasted, the psychological effects of the gulag, the social dynamics of the camp, and the terrible weather in Siberia. They only spend the first ten or fifteen minutes of the film in the actual camp, so I would not consider this a "camp film."