Review of Rescue Dawn (2007) by Kenneth L — 13 Jun 2011

This is a compelling and surprisingly straightforward film from the eccentric German director Werner Herzog. He usually makes films about maniacal characters pursuing obsessions that mostly only make sense to themselves (see Fitzcarraldo for example). Here, the main character does doggedly pursue a goal, but his goal is to escape a Vietnamese (well, ok, Laotian technically) prisoner of war camp and survive, which is pretty understandable to just about anybody.

Christian Bale plays Dieter Dengler, a German-born American fighter pilot who gets shot down in the jungle early in the Vietnam war. He gets captured by the Vietcong, and spends the rest of the movie planning to escape. That's all the plot set-up you really need. It's less glorified than The Great Escape, and less obsessed with the particular details of escape than the TV show Prison Break. The focus is more on the character himself, and on just how hard it is for him to escape and survive.

Bale's performance is extremely good, and it's one of those roles where you can see he really underwent some grueling physical changes for it. Possibly even better, though, are the two haunting supporting performances by Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies. This is probably the best dramatic part I've seen for Zahn, as a fellow prisoner who finds himself having to trust Dieter. Davies is usually a skinny guy, but damn is he emaciated here, as another prisoner whose is losing his grip on reality after two years in the camp.

The movie is a case-study in the virtue of location shooting. When one of the prisoners tell Dengler that "the jungle is the prison," it has a lot of impact, because we've already seen that immense jungle. It's intense watching the characters struggle through incredibly thick plant growth and rafting down scary rivers. The jungle is paradoxically quite beautiful, and the cinematography captures it quite well, but it's also clearly tough to stay alive in. Normally I would talk about how bizarre Werner Herzog is, but sort of like the Coen brothers did with True Grit, he pretty much plays this one straight. There's no sense of anything sneaky or subversive going on here, just a harrowing story played naturalistically.