But let's start from the very beginning. Some time ago I had finally seen that movie just because of family reasons. After all Siberian experience of forced labor, escapes from the camps, death shots in Katyń woodlands or elsewhere, that's all a family history, so watching a movie done by a great director in 21st century may make this thing kind of closer.
There are several guys in the camp of several different ethnicities. Some of them Russian, some of them French and a Polish guy (Jim Sturgees) who was betrayed by his own wife. Not of her own will, obviously. Soviet bastards forced her to do this. After all if you rape or beat the lady, not many of them are tough enough not to talk what the "authorities" want to hear.
In the camp we see rules of life. Urkas are the rule and among them the leader - called exactly Urka (Colin Farrell), not Walka like some idiots writting movie reviews want us to believe.
Soviets divided prisoners into political ones: enemies of the state, and Urkas - mere criminals, rapists, murderers, etc. After all every system has this kind of people. They had been rewarded by the camp rulers for spying on those political ones and exactly that is shown in the movie. Scenes in the camp belong to the best ones, because the rest is unfortunately not as good.
The rest of the movie shows the escape and obstacles on the way. But something was wrong with music. This movie had been too silent. Semi-desert had also been too silent. Several times there have been scenes repeated picturing the group walking down the bank of the Baikal Lake (deepest one in the world). These scenes might have been of bigger variety of angles, light etc.
Strong sides of the movie? Yes, there are two of them, well three. At first people responsible for light should be awarded with Oscar. It's been quite a while since I had seen a movie where light was worked out to the tiny detail. Currently noone seems to care and very often we see that a person is additionally lit up with a 300W light bulb even if the scene is shot outdoors. This is against a lot of rules, but rich producers of nowadays explain it by budget reasons. Oh really? They receive 10x that much as their predecessors some 20 years ago and yet 20 years ago light was light. It had to be obeyed with no exceptions.
So if you want to see a movie where a sunlight is a sunlight and if it shines it shines properly with right intensity from the proper side of a person, you should watch The Way Back to learn how to do it. If compared hardly any movie of recent matches up to this standard, and here including Avatar, Sherlock Holmes and many others.
Another plus is the scene when Urka decides to stay. In some conversations with Russian dissidents or from Vladimir Bukovsky book I have learned that the lowest category wolf still never ever leaves his pack. And that the most Soviet people did not want to pay the price of freedom. Known hell is still better than unknown heaven.
The third good thing in the movie is a feeling of reunion... a march to freedom, when finally in 1989 a husband can hug a wife whom he had not seen since 1940's. I won't say more. I would expect much much more of Peter Weir, but nevertheless it is a movie worth watching.
