Rescue Dawn
By Charles Mudede

If you’ve seen Herzog’s documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly then there is no need for you to see Rescue Dawn, Herzog’s dramatization of that 1997 documentary.

General criticism: Rescue Dawn is Herzog minus cinema, minus any magic, minus a sense of cosmic wonder. What we see on the screen is a politically complex story that’s been boiled down to the pulp of a simple story about survival, about how one man defeated all the forces of nature. More specific criticism: Beneath the surface of its jungle adventure, Little Dieter Needs to Fly had the historical depth of World War II—the horror of which led the hero, like a sleepwalker, into the nightmare of the Vietnam War. None of this historical and psychological depth is in Rescue Dawn, and by the end of the film we have no idea why anyone needs to fly, needs to go to war, or needs to incinerate villages with napalm bombs.

The film begins as Dieter, a German-American pilot played by Christian Bale, receives an order from his commander to bomb enemy bases in Laos. He takes off, flies, is shot down, captured, and uses his wits to escape from a POW camp in the middle of the jungle. With the kind of photography that gives the imagination little excitement or joy, we see a very thin Dieter hiding under massive leaves, leaping over livid bushes, running around poisonous plants, swimming against the deadly pull of a waterfall, tearing leeches off his chest, and eating a live snake. Dieter will do whatever it takes to live. That is the sole point of a movie that could easily have been about the most relevant issue of our day: American imperialism.

RESCUE DAWN DIR. WERNER HERZOG | RATED PG-13