Rescue Dawn

Synopsis: The real life story of Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) a German-born American navy pilot who escaped from a POW camp after being shot down over Laos in a secret bombing sortie early in the Vietnam War.

Werner Herzog has had a long and productive career with a broad output and this, his latest effort as director and writer is both a solid addition to his CV and a relatively unusual one. Solid in that Herzog delivers a reasonably convincing story of survival in the jungle, a territory that he is eminently familiar with having directed the Klaus Kinski classics, Aguirre: Wrath Of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982). Unusual in that his treatment of the story is quite conventional and were it not for its relatively low-keyness might be the product of any skilled Hollywood studio director. Dieter Dengler is very much the Indiana Jones hero and his opponents (and comrades), two-dimensional characters. Which is to say that as an adventure yarn this film is quite satisfactory, slow to build but well-crafted and rewardingly tense when it gets going but, from a director of Herzog's credentials, a little wanting.

Herzog first related Dengler's story in his 1997 documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly which I have not seen. In this fictional version, Indiana, sorry, Dieter is an indefatigably positive/ seemingly charmed soul who emerges unscathed from the crash landing of his plane, survives a year or so in a POW despite taking no crap from his captors and hacks his way out of the jungle to a back-slapping rendezvous with his Navy mates. Although the context of the story is the Vietnam war, Herzog, if not ignoring it altogether, has little interest in the broader political and socio-historical context. That Dengler was fun-living American quite prepared to kill innocent people so that he could follow his dream of flying is taken at face value. Christian Bale in a typically strong performance plays him as a fearlessly optimistic and indefatigably energetic individual given to action rather than self-reflection. Rounding out the cast are the oddly-cast Steve Zahn who looks like a Arkansas hillbilly and an emaciated Jeremy Davies who must have seen Bale in The Machinist, 2004 and has tried to outdo him in the weight loss department. The rest of the cast are simply stock characters.

Dengler's story is certainly a remarkable one but if we are spared the over-produced, Hollywood action film effects that we might have had had a Philip Kaufman or Ridley Scott been helming the project, in Herzog's hands he is, nevertheless, very much the mythic hero and in a film that is purporting to be a true story, this is a disappointment.

 

 

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