The Way Back

Directed by Peter Weir

(PG-13)

**

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After seeing this “earnest and well-acted” adaptation of Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk, you’ll feel like “you’ve traveled half the planet,” said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. The Polish soldier claimed in his popular 1956 memoir that he and a handful of other prisoners escaped from a Soviet gulag in 1941 and then completed a 4,000-mile trek through Siberian forests and across the plains of Mongolia, the sandstorm-buffeted Gobi desert, and the snowy peaks of the Himalayas. If nothing else, the movie’s “astonishing to look at.” Lead actors Jim Sturgess, Ed Harris, and Colin Farrell bring strong résumés to their roles, said Peter Debruge in Variety. But director Peter Weir “clearly finds the voyage more important than the voyagers.” The story’s barely developed characters are “constantly at risk of disappearing against the immensity of their surroundings.” Missing, too, are the “details of survival” you’d expect if Rawicz’s tale weren’t a fabrication—as newer evidence suggests it probably is, said Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. Weir has created “a visual feast,” but “not every incredible story makes a compelling movie.”