„»The Way Back« is based on a book called »The Long Walk« by Slavomir Rawicz, a Gulag survivor who »borrowed« his escape story: Three Poles crossed the Himalayas from Siberia into India in the 1940s; the Polish consulate recorded their arrival; one of them told his story to Rawicz. But the film is »true« in every way that matters. Many of the camp scenes are taken directly from Soviet archives and memoirs. The starving men scrambling for garbage; the tattooed criminals, playing cards for the clothes of other prisoners; the narrow barracks; the logging camp; the vicious Siberian storms. Among the very plausible characters are an American who went to work on the Moscow subway and fell victim to the Great Terror of 1937, a Polish officer arrested after the Soviet Union's 1939 invasion of Poland and a Latvian priest whose church was destroyed by the Bolsheviks.
These scenes and people are realistic. But they are definitely not familiar. I've found at least one review that situates the story during »Hitler's reign over Poland,« failing to note that Stalin reigned over Poland then, too. I've also read complaints about the lack of sexual tension between the escaped convicts and the teenage girl they pick up along the way (»the real-life threat of rape never appears«). But in »real life,« these rough-looking men were from nice Central European homes, as the presence of the girl reminds them. Rape would have been out of character.
I haven't found any reviews, so far, that hail this as Hollywood's first Gulag movie, perhaps because hardly anyone noticed that there weren't any before. Weir told me that many in Hollywood were surprised by the story: They'd never heard of Soviet concentration camps, only German ones. »If you need to explain what a film is about,« the film is in trouble - and this one almost was. Weir had difficulties getting it distributed and some problems explaining the final scene to his financial backers.”