Dir. Werner Herzog, US, 2006, 126 mins
Cast: Zach Grenier, Marshall Bell, Christian Bale, Toby Huss, Pat Healy
Review by Johnny Messias
Survival in the jungle can be more challenging than choosing the right bikini and trying not to flirt with the wrong person on television. Rescue Dawn is a POW drama in which eating worms is not a way to win prizes, but a possible alternative to starvation. Set just before the main Vietnam offensive, in 1966, it is however not quite a traditional war movie but rather an exceptional tale of survival and one man’s refusal to lie down in the most perilous of circumstances.
For US Naval pilot, Dieter Dengler his Vietnam War ended 40 minutes into his very first mission when he was shot down over the Ho Chi Minh Trail during a classified sortie.
Members of his squadron saw the mangled wreckage of his aircraft, fearing that that even if he survived the crash, he would still have to face the Laotian jungle. You could forgive the German-born pilot (played by Christian Bale) for succumbing: poisonous snakes, insects, impassable terrain, hostile villages and the local equivalent of the Viet Cong were all going against him.
As portrayed here, Dengler doesn’t flinch. Even after he is (perhaps inevitably) captured, and as he is paraded through a local village, Bale portrays Dieter’s defiance with a beatific smile— which promptly deserts him when he’s hung upside down with a wasp’s nest roped next to his face.
Once he reaches the prison camp, he immediately tells fellow US POWs Duane (Steve Zahn) and Gene (Jeremy Davies) that he will escaping in due course. Rescue Dawn is not a Hollywood action movie. It has a European documentary feel and the sense of riot that you only get in a Werner Herzog production.
A proper filmmaker (he grew up without a television), he employs old school, nuts and bolts techniques, to fill his frames with the menace of the jungle. His cameras keep you close to the action and the actors keep you gripped. Zahn is excellent, a real surprise after a string of comedy roles, as is Jeremy Davies (Saving Private Ryan) as the crazed Duane. As the conditions in the camp worsen, and the escape attempt gets nearer, there is real tension between the POWs and their fellow (Asian) prisoners and it all plays out extremely convincingly.
Holding this gripping film together is Christian Bale, his intensity shining through, as this extraordinary man who kept his wits intact in the face of these indignities; with such odds against him.
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