RESCUE DAWN

Director: Werner Herzog (Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Grizzley Man)
Starring: Christian Bale, Steve Zahn

Wener Herzog's latest is very much the prototypical Herzog film. It's about obsession, man versus nature, and about finding the limits of how far we can drive ourselves. The story isn't even new to Herzog this time, as Rescue Dawn is simply a dramatization of Herzog's previous documentary on Dieter Dengler, a Vietnam War POW, called Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Oh, and it's also prototypically Herzogian in that it's excellent.

Dieter Dengler is very much a Herzogian protagonist. He's a character based on a real person; a real person who drove himself physically and emotionally to places that few of us will ever go. He is a naturalized American (originally from Germany, as if you couldn't tell from the 'Dieter' ...) who had a dream to fly. He moved to America to live his dream, and joined the US Air Force. On his very first combat mission early on in the Vietnam War his plane was shot down during a bombing run on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. He is captured, tortured, and locked away to rot with a handful of other POWs in a bamboo prison in the middle of an enormous monsoon jungle.

For your average, everyday kind of person, capture, torture and imprisonment might tend to bring you down. But not for Dieter. From the first day in internment, he is self-assured and positive, practically bouncy (at least compared to the other POWs). He knows that he will escape, or at least that he will try. There is a strength of will and of attitude that the horrible conditions just can't conquer.

But then his conditions get worse. After infighting amongst the prisoners, they manage to escape. They're nearly starved (resorting to eating maggots at one point ... and yes, I've read that they were real maggots that Christian Bale ate). They have no shoes. They don't really know where they are. But little Dieter has one thing going for him, his attitude. He won't give up. He may be killed, but he won't lay down and die.

But then his conditions get worse. His POW friend (Zahn) is killed by villagers. American helicopters that he thinks are going to rescue him, shoot at him instead. He's now alone, delirious and wasted away from lack of food. Through all of this he still manages to struggle on, through the thick green jungle that seems to grasp at him at every step.

Luckily his conditions don't get any worse. Frankly, I don't see how they could. At the point where his been reduced to eating a live snake for sustanance, a helicopter sites him in a riverbed. It's random that the helicopter found him, pure luck. But it was Dieter's determination in the face of overwhelming conditions that allowed the luck to fall his way. If he would have given up early on, as you or I probably would have, that helicopter would not have found him. But he didn't.

It's a fairly straight-forward film, just man versus his own will to survive, but it's excellent. I'm not sure I can even describe why. It is not a deep film. At least in terms of complicated intellectual ideas it's not. There's no denying that it's a very deep film in terms of how far it goes to show what it wants to show. It's simple, and powerful. It's often a hard film to watch, but it's never debasing. It's just a good movie.

Standouts: Herzog, the actors, and the real-life Dieter Dengler. I'm also a big fan of the guard "jumbo".
Blowouts: It's sometimes hard to sympathize with Dieter. Is this man a "hero", bigger and better than you or me? Or is there in fact something wrong with him? Something in his head that might not be so useful anywhere else except alone and in the jungle? The movie doesn't think so, but I'm not so convinced.

Grade: A