As Far as my Feet Will Carry Me

Let me begin by saying I never thought I would like a movie with a Nazi solider as the protagonist.  However, in the first scene of As Far as my Feet Will Carry Me (So Weit die Fusse Tragen) we meet a young German soldier getting on a train to ship out.  His wife and young daughter make it to the train station just in time; they've come from the doctor.  They're going to have another baby.  They hug and cry, and he ships out.  The next thing we know he's on a train to a Siberian POW camp.  He escapes, and from that point on, the story is mostly him vs the wilderness.  In many ways, this movie is very, very similar to The Way Back.  However, unlike in that movie, our relationship to the main character is complicated by his Nazi past. The scenes of him in the camp become complicated ruminations on man's inhumanity to man.  It is impossible to watch gaunt men in prison stripes lined up to do hard labor without thinking of Auschwitz, and yet Stalin's death camp is filled with Nazis.  This irony is somewhat lost on the film, and it comes to an unsatisfying conclusion later on in the movie.  Aside from that, this is a good movie about surviving in the wild, but I greatly preferred The Way Back.  As a side note, because there are few native German speakers in the movie, the spoken German is slow and uses small words, which made it excellent practice for my German (and some Russian too).  (It's subtitled in English)  C+.