Earlier this week people went gaga over the idea Peter Weir’s latest film, The Way Back would received a one-week Oscar qualifying run, but I thought that had already been established so I didn’t understand the fuss. Nevertheless, the first trailer for the film has just arrived giving everyone a preview of what’s to come.
Kris Tapley saw the film at Telluride and gave it four-out-of-four stars calling it “quietly profound, epic, bold filmmaking at its very best.”
The Way Back is a fact-based story of the escape of soldiers from a Siberian gulag in 1940. It is based on several sources, most notably the Slavomir Rawicz book “The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom.” The book is Rawicz’s account of being captured by the Red Army in 1939 and his journey to freedom with other inmates. The group crossed the Siberian arctic, the Gobi desert and the Himalayas, finally settling in Tibet and India.
The film stars Ed Harris, Colin Farrell, Jim Sturgess and Saoirse Ronan and is expected to hit theaters on December 29, expanding to a wide release on January 21, 2011. Check out the trailer directly below and leave your thoughts in the comments below.
