During WWII, Siberian gulag escapees walk 4000 miles overland to freedom in India. [imdb]
Nominated for 1 Oscar: Best Makeup
In the summer of 2010 people were already talking about this film. I myself thought at that time that, based on what we knew about it, it was a serious contender for Best Picture and Best Director. I had it for months on my prediction chart, but as nobody was picking it up, embracing it, etc, it just faded away. In the end it scored a Makeup nomination, and might I say a worthy one.
But it wasn't just the poor film distribution/campaign stopping The Way Back from making it big at the Oscars. It was also its poor quality to blame for the lack of success. I didn't like it. I might've enjoyed short scenes and some beautiful landscape, but I thought overall it was messy. Peter Weir is a good director, sometimes an incredible director, but definitely not successful as a writer. The dialogue is plain stupid at times, there are some casting mistakes and simply put the film just goes nowhere.
I thought Jim Sturgess's performance was awful at times and one of the 2 Romanian actors didn't do great either. Harris is fine, Saoirse is ok, Colin is cool - but nobody is great. And also: this film would've been much better in Russian; it feels confused and undecided and it lacks believability everytime the actors open their mouths and throw in some silly accents.
My rating for the film: 4.5/10. Way too long.
Posts
Yes, this seemed to become a strong contender before it came out. I'm not really interested in it.
ReplyDeleteGosh, I've not seen anyone dislike it yet.
ReplyDeleteI agree it was too long, and the accents were all over the place. But as a docu-drama type movie which simply explained what the characters did rather than the why I loved it.
Perhaps if you read the book The Long Walk you would appreciate the film more, Slavomir was a fine man and his book is well read, a very sad story with tragic end with only Slav and Mr Smith surviving - maybe the actors are not passionate enough with regard to the true story.
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