An epic road movie. Based on a true story that was probably plagiarized by author Slavomir Rawicz as his own experience. A handful of Polish prisoners in the Russian Gulag in Siberia during WWII, escape their prison in the freezing tundra and travel 4000 miles to freedom in India, going through the Gobi Desert AND over the freezing Himilayas.
This survival story was most amazing to me in that it is probably the first Hollywood movie about the Russian Gulags. There are dozens and dozens of movies and television stories about the German concentration camps in WWII, but what most of the public does not know is that the Soviet Communist Gulag system makes the Nazi camps look like children’s play pens. Problem is, they didn’t get the exposure they should have. It reveals how uneducated many people are about the truly evil empire of Soviet Russia and the atrocities that dwarfed the Nazi machine by 3x. Stalin starved over 20 million of his own people. 20 million of his own people. And that is not counting the other 30 million killed in the entire Stalin era for a grand total near 50 MILLION PEOPLE – savagely and brutally killed, many of them tortured as “political dissidents” because they were not Communist party members. Yet, this is the FIRST movie about the Soviet Gulags? All I can say is Peter Weir is a heroic filmmaker to bring out this essence of Communism in an era that seems to deny it was even a threat.