Review of Rescue Dawn (2007) by Marcus B — 03 Aug 2012

The movie itself is quite decent, although I must say that it failed to touch me. The actors did their bit, the cinematography is flawless, the story is just as touching and heart-breaking as you'd expect considering the subject... and yet, the movie never managed to pull me in, if you know what I mean. I was an interested, but detached outer observer from the beginning to the end, although I must admit that I was a bit nauseated by that SO typically Hollywood-like grande finale.

The funny thing is that the movie is actually much better than the number of "stars" I'm giving it seem to indicate. The fact is that if it wasn't a rather good movie, I would have been far less generous than I am. But... once I saw the movie, I made a quick research regarding the episode depicted in "Rescue Dawn" and what do you know; the director thought that real life events didn't make good enough movie and started to "change" things. Now, that in itself is not unusual - Hollywood is after all well-known for its "artistic license". But Mr. Herzog went a bit too far and pretty much committed a character assassination of at least one of the real prisoners. This doesn't fly very well with me, thus only two stars.