Movie Review: Rescue Dawn

Rescue Dawn is a second telling of the story of Dieter Dengler for writter-director Werner Herzog. The first was a 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. This is a dramatization of how Dengler, a US Navy pilot, was shot down over Laos flying a mission in 1966. He was captured, held in a prison with 2 other Americans and some chinese, and escaped.

This is not a standard escape from a POW camp film. The men are all going a bit crazy and are weaker than Survivor contestants during the last week. Then there's the Fear Factor moment when they're served live worms for dinner. Escape is not Steve McQueen jumping a fence on a motorcycle but is hacking their way though dense jungles and dealing with leaches, mudslides and lack of food. Filmed in Thailand the jungle itself is practically a character.

Christian Bale plays Dieter Dengler. It's yet another role where he undergoes a dramatic weight change. At first Dieter seems to not realize the situation he was in once captured. He was smiling at the kids as he was led into a town, annoyed with the soldiers when they left him tied up when he asked to go to the bathroom ("What's wrong with you?"), and spoke to the commander who asked him to sign a confession as if he was complaining to a hotel manager. I'm not sure if it was a deliberate choice by Bale or Herzog or just my interpretation but I found it strange. Steve Zahn leaves his standard comedy roles behind and plays Duane Martin as a man on verge of breaking down. He was in the camp for some time before Dengler arrived and escaped with him.

Gene DeBruin had been in the camp about 2.5 years when Dieter arrived. In the film he's basically insane and Jeremy Davies plays him very twitchy and almost incoherent. In this interview Davis talks about honoring the men by filming in authentic locations and undergoing severe weight loss. However this site describes many differences between the film and reality according to some documents, family, friends, and the account of the only remaining survivor Pisidhi Indradat.

Given this I don't know what to make of the film. The changes seem gratuitous and designed to pump up Dengler's abilities and importance at the cost of the other characters. Then again, it could have been for dramatic purposes to show the effects of captivity more strongly. It's easier to make a point with several one dimensional characters than with multi-dimensional ones. Then again the film wastes some time with events before the crash and after the rescue that were really unnecessary. The whole film had an odd vibe to it and this is apparently typical for Herzog. Rescue Dawn was interesting to see for the realism if not the reality.