I've yet to watch this movie but the synopsis sounds very suspiciously like the one for Zhang Yimou's 2005 movie "Qian li zou dan qi", or "Riding alone for thousands of miles" (http://akas.imdb.com/title/tt0437447/) and I don't see it referenced anywhere. Am I wrong to make the connection?
shareFrom the trivia section:
In an LA radio interview on "The Busted Halo Show with Father Dave", Emilio Estevez revealed that much of the inspiration he got for this film was the identical pilgrimage that his father Martin Sheen and his son Taylor Estevez made a few years before on the Camino de Santiego de Compostela in Spain. Estevez' son, then 19, fell in love, moved to Spain, and got married a few years later. Since that trip, Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez spoke often of how they could make a film about the pilgrimage until an idea surfaced.Emilio's son Taylor Estevez was born in 1984. When he was 19, the year was 2003. Qian Li Zou Dan Qi was released two years later, in 2005.
Hum, I see. They wanted to make a movie about the Camino de Santiago, and that was the original idea, okay, but that idea that surfaced and ultimately became "The way" could still have been ~inspired~ by Yimou's movie. I'm not trying to pick a fight here or anything, in fact I wanna give you a big thank you for taking your time to reply to me! :-) If anything, I'm just using logic. The movies aren't exactly the same - in one the son is terminally ill in a modern hospital but still not dead and his relationship with his father is very bad, in fact intentionally inexistent -, but I can't help but think that all of those overlapping plot elements cannot be coincidental, at least not entirely. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but the impression I get...you know.
But like I said, this isn't about me trying to pick a fight, I'm just using logic and who knows, maybe the two movies are completely independent, separate works. It's just that I hadn't heard anything, really *anything*, about "The way" until it premiered here in Spain and everything I've ever heard about it makes me think of "Riding alone". Oh well.
It wasn't inspired by Riding Alone because it was a personal experience that already transpired, and it transpired twice before 2005. Emilio's son did the full pilgrimage in 2003, then he re-did it shortly after, still in 2003, with Martin Sheen, and the pilgrimage is the film.
The films are two entirely different films. Some of the plot elements overlap, and there are many strong thematic parallels, but what transpires during each journey is completely different.
The protagonist of The Way goes on the pilgrimage for completely different reasons than the protagonist of Riding Alone. The father steps into his son's skin and walksthe pilgrimage for his son, whereas in Riding Alone, the father steps out of his primitive isolationistic past into the modern heavily populated present in order to reconcile his relationship with his son. The Way includes multiple people walking the pilgrimage, and each person has their fare share of inner pain which led them to the pilgrimage, and they all understand and feel each other's pain. The pilgrimage route is pre-ordained and traditional and has religious undertones, the pilgrimage itself is the film, and the film is a blend of humour and drama. The journey asserts itself as a categorical imperative to restoring faith.
The protagonist of Riding Alone gets waylaid and sidetracked by people who don't really care about his inner pain, he has trouble communicating with everyone, the crux of his journey starts later in the film, his journey was not pre-planned or traditional - it was uncharted and unpredictable, and while the film has humour, it's strained because of the overhanging and impending imminent death of the son. And his journey asserts itself with a vengeance to bring together the past and present of China's political and cultural landscape in order to save China's future from death.
Riding Alone must be watched critically because it's part political treatise and part history lesson, whereas The Way does not require that critical eye. Any person of nearly any age anywhere in the world will quickly identify with The Way's universal symbolism and archetypal structure, the film's mythos is common and universal, whereas with Riding Alone, viewers need to approach the film critically to understand what's really going on (it's not just a story about a father travelling over the ends of the China to reconcile with his dying son).
>> "Riding alone for thousands of miles"
This sounds cool, I wonder if I can find it on any streaming service ... with subtitles of course. Thanks