It’s about the landscapes and backdrops. They provide a great diversion away from the poor dialogue and the bluntly heroic characters.
Weir couldn’t make a boring film if his life depended on it, and for any other director The Way Back would be laudable. It’s good, but from this director we have come to expect great.
Generally...Peter Weir resists the story's potential for heart-racing excitement.
Handsome real-life epic lacks dramatic tension.
Weir’s gulag-break film makes a conscientious stab at ‘triumph of the human spirit’ uplift. It’s all painstakingly done – but not quite as involving as it should be.
A journey that feels awful and heroic and unfathomable – and one you’ll want to watch again.
Weir has put together a good film – oddly, though, considering its scale, it feels like a rather small one.
Scenic but pedestrian.
For the most part, though, The Way Back is a solid piece of epic film-making and a welcome return to the big screen for a director too often absent from the scene.
It's as if Weir believes that what happens outside the struggle between man and nature just isn't very interesting.
The bigger issue with Peter Weir's respectable new film is that there's not quite enough drama in it.
The opening 40 minutes in the camp are perhaps the strongest part, though the trek through frozen forests, along Lake Baikal and across the Trans-Siberian railway to the desert, skirting all settled communities, is full of incident, pain and shared experience.
The only problem is this is a film about people walking - and after two hours, it feels like you are trudging along with them.
As the journey drags on there is heartbreak, though it didn't prevent me glancing at my watch.
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General release. Check local listings for show times.
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