Rescue Dawn
Directed by Werner Herzog.
This war/prison drama from Werner Herzog is based on his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly and tells the real-life tale of German born Dieter Dengler, who fantasised as a child about being a pilot. This child-hood dream is recounted profoundly by Christian Bale, who plays the lead, partway through Rescue Dawn, but we initially are thrust into 1960s American military meetings. Dengler travelled to America in pursuit of his dream and was shot down in the early stages of the Vietnam War, but his determination — evinced in his change of citizenship to achieve his dream — is the driving force that led to his survival in a Viet Cong prisoner of war camp.
Rescue Dawn is beautifully shot, and brilliantly acted, and presents a strikingly artistic coverage of one man's torturous ordeal against the picturesque setting of the Vietnamese jungle. Throughout the movie, the suspense is held taut and high, and one cannot help empathise enormously with the inmates, and occasionally some of the guards. This was not always an easy and expected situation, as one of the characters named Gene was particularly sinister at times. But the actor assuming this role, Jeremy Davies, delivers a magnificently pitch-perfect performance punctuated by moments of humanity, which in turn delivers a far more layered depiction of the effects of captivity on the human soul. The triage of Bale, Davies and Steve Zahn — who should be commended for his restrained performance, with just the right hint of characteristic humour — are at the heart of this film and collectively offer up one of the strongest cinematic testimonies to the power of human survival in recent years.
These grand notions of survival and humanity were what were received strongest by this viewer, for most of Rescue Dawn's duration. And Herzog should be commended for an otherwise tightly and gorgeously filmed picture which had expansive emotional reach. However, the ending was positively awful. Such a debacle renders the film actually useful for aspiring film-makers in how NOT to close a movie. Specifically, the tone of the ending jarred with that of the actual film, and its jingoism felt distasteful and offensive in light of the visceral, heartbreaking performances of the leads and the profundity of the film as a whole. This was the only sequence that actually left this viewer cold but, though lessened, the impact of Rescue Dawn still resonated.
Sarah Reid
Esther Speight
