Of the many brilliant things about Rescue Dawn, perhaps most attractive is the notion that Werner Herzog, the singular arthouse talent behind Aguirre; Wrath Of God and Grizzly Man set out to make an accessible, rollicking war flick. He succeeds in some style. Rescue Dawn may be one of the great Vietnam movies, a POW adventure worthy to stand should to shoulder with The Great Escape and an epic struggle between Man and Nature.
We have, of course, been here before. Herzog has never been too sentimental about the jungle and here you long for the relative holiday camp offered in Fitzcarraldo. And yet, for all the restraints of the genre, in this and other respects Rescue Dawn looks and sounds exactly like one of Herzog’s battier offerings.
Christian Bale, for example, occupies the kind of role that might have easily been played by the late Klaus Kinski, Herzog’s terrifyingly intense former collaborator. The role in question is Dieter Dengler, a high-spirited adventurer who really is Werner Herzog’s kind of guy.
The German director first captured Dengler’s terrifying tale of survival in the 1998 documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly and he takes another crack at the story with this stirring feature film. You can see the appeal. Dengler’s recollections of the war form a riveting and harrowing tale of survival. Shot down over Laos in the early stages of the Vietnam War, the German born fighter pilot was confined to a sadistic POW camp. He soon plans an escape with his equally demented fellow prisoners but the jungle beyond proves far more impenetrable than the camp. Weakened by dysentery and hunger, his cohorts fall by the wayside leaving Mr. Dengler to survive on snake meat and maggots on the most hostile terrain.
A terrific boy’s own adventure shot through with Herzog’s deliciously dark wit and Bale’s unnerving rawness, in a season of mind numbing, wake-me-when-it’s-over Iraq movies, this is the war film to beat.