Rescue Dawn
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Movie Reviews of Rescue Dawn
Movie Review: A rich and lush depiction of one mans fight for survival...
Summary: 4 Stars
Christian Bale has been Oscar worthy time in and time out. He is, without question, one of our finest working actors, so it is no surprise that the best thing about `Rescue Dawn' is Bale's harrowing performance. As Lt. Dieter Dengler, Bale is breathtaking. While the film itself is flawed his performance is far from it.
`Rescue Dawn' centers around a young pilot who is shot down behind enemy lines and taken prisoner by the Pathet Lao. In his newfound POW camp Dengler meets five other captives who have been in captivity for a much longer period of time. This fact is evident in their mental state for the lack of food and lack of hope has begun to strip away their sanity. Dengler immediately makes a connection with the only stable man in the group, Duane Martin, and the two of them start to plan an escape.
As far as POW films go this film can't compare to greats like `The Deer Hunter' but it does have a lot going for it. First of all it is visually mesmerizing. To be honest I am reminded of the feeling I got when watching last years `The Painted Veil', that surreal overwhelming feeling of seeing something truly rich and lush, and there are many scenes, especially in the third act, that are supremely rich and lush. The jungle is so green, so vibrant that it becomes its own character. The acting on all fronts is great. Much has been said of Steve Zahn's performance, and while I don't feel it was `a revelation' I do feel that it is his finest performance yet, but then again, that really isn't saying much is it? Bale as has been mentioned time and time again is brilliant here. If this movie had been released this month instead of mid-year he could be a serious contender for the Oscar, but sadly he will most likely be overlooked.
Jeremy Davies' character adds a lot to the feel of this film for he starts off where Dengler will ultimately end up (in regards to mental instability). I think that is truly the beauty of Bale's rich performance. He takes on such a transformation, yet it is so controlled and gradual that it never feels forced. You have watched him transform before your eyes at such a natural pace that it all makes sense to you. And not only does he take on the mental transformation, but physically as well he wastes away before the camera.
The direction by Werner Herzog is also very good and deserves mention. Obviously he is very interested and connected to this heroic tale. I think maybe that his `connection' to the subject may have blinded him slightly when concluding this picture, for those last few moments really do a number on the overall feel of the film. In other words, I hated the ending. It felt way too Hollywood for a film that up until that point felt nothing like the sentimental mush hand fed to the masses today. That is a small bone to pick, I know, and the other flaws I find within the film are petty in themselves. There are moments of sheer confusion which were slightly irritating (the POW camp scenes seem frantic at times and with everyone whispering it becomes a strain to try and follow what is actually going on) but overall it's nothing too disappointing.
In the end `Rescue Dawn' was a very good film, not perfect but not every film has to be. Bale is as great as they say he is, but what else would you expect. I will say that I hope and pray this at least picks up a Cinematography nomination at this year's Oscars for Peter Zeitlinger does such an outstanding job in allowing the scenery to move the film that I'm tempted to say he is the best thing to happen to this movie.
Movie Review: True Life Hero and 'Survivor': Laos, 1965 Edition
Summary: 4 Stars
There's nothing quite like the survivor story. 'Lord of the Flies,' 'Robinson Crusoe,' 'Midnight Express,' and more recently the 'Survivor' TV series and Mel Gibson's `Apolcalypto' continue to capture our imagination. Set in 1965 at a time when America is hardly cognizant that the conflict is turning into war, true tale "Rescue Dawn," features Navy pilot, Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) all gung ho to fly with childhood memories of a pilot who waved at him flying near his house. Grown, he is going on a top secret mission in Laos, in what seems to be a simple intervention. The movie shows that mission go awry when he bombs enemy facilities and is shot down in the jungle. Miraculously, and not too worse for wear, he is thrown from the wreckage of his incinerated plane, only to flee from the marshes, then through the jungle in enemy territory.
He gives it his best effort: Relying on the river, hiding with camouflage, laying low, and keeping noise at a minimum, there isn't, nevertheless, anywhere to go. They eventually capture him, and being a loyal military man, he refuses to sign the papers implicating the "Imperial" power of the United States. Grimly, he is given terrible treatment. To bring him to docile resistance, they use many methods, including tying him upside down with an ant hill attached to his head.
Once broken down they send him to a bamboo facility. There Dieter is tied down, handcuffed and shackled to a wooden beam. He keeps close quarters with fellow prisons, including some Americans. He's shocked to learn, they too, were on top secret missions well before his. Having one native prisoner who speaks the language helps, but noticing the Americans, particularly Duane (Steve Zahn) and Eugene (Jeremy Davies), so emaciated does not. Both are worn, with Eugene showing signs of a fragile psyche, one not inclined to take risks. Duane is more friendly and resourceful for information. Which is essential, for their prison becomes as daunting for escape as Alcatraz. Seeming labyrinthine with high mountains, thick jungles, dangerous animals, and hardly a compass, "The jungle is the prison," as Duane asserts. That is if they can get past their handcuffs and guards with machine guns to begin with.
Much of Dieter's dilemma is getting everyone to see the advantage of escape. Particularly Eugene wants to leave during the Monsoon season, so they have enough water and their tracks can't be traced. That shows reality well enough, but he's mostly delusional, thinking they'll release him by the next monsoon when he's clearly already been through at least one already. Having meager food rationing doesn't help their strength or reasoning abilities, so Dieter understandably must work quickly.
`Rescue Dawn' just like the men knows when to go on its feet and when to lay low. Anticipation creeps along as we find what ingenuity the captives can muster with the lowest of resources. Besides genuine performances, especially by Bale as the beleaguered hero, Director Werner Herzog keeps it real by giving us such close shots or terrain and foliage we find ourselves flinching many times throughout. The timing of each endangerment is done briskly enough with a prologue that makes us understand the men's dilemma and feel it like a first-person perspective. Impeccably crafted 'Rescue Dawn' is one riveting true life adventure.
Movie Review: Excellent
Summary: 4 Stars
It's been quite a few years since Werner Herzog did a major fictive film. The last couple of decades has seen an increasing veer into documentaries and more experimental cinema. However, with 2007 film, Rescue Dawn, Herzog shows that the years have not taken their all too inexorable toll on the visionary mind. While the film is not an inarguably great masterpiece along the lines of some of his classic fictive films from the 1970s, it is a terrific war film, but, more so, a terrific prison escape and action film, even as it wholly subverts many of those subgenre's worst banalities.
The film is sometimes an expansion, condensation, and retelling of the same basic tale Herzog told in his classic 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly. That film chronicled the life and capture, over Laos, of a German born U.S. Navy Pilot named Dieter Dengler, who spent six months as a prisoner of war in Laos, before escaping with six other men into the jungle. Only Dengler was known to have survived. Rescue Dawn details and condenses many aspects of the earlier film, and is well acted by a stellar cast, well directed by Herzog, and brilliantly cinematographed by Peter Zeitlinger, who melds the stunning visuals of Thailand with Herzog's own classic `eye level realism' to evoke some of the same sorts of jungle imagery that made films like Aguirre: The Wrath Of God and Fitzcarraldo so impressive. On top of that is the wonderful film scoring by Klaus Bedelt, which is very minimal yet effective when employed; mixing the high and low forms of music Herzog is known for.
The plot is rather simple, and greatly condenses the tale the real Dengler tells within the earlier film.... The acting, especially on Bale's part, is outstanding. In each of his roles, Bale creates characters wildly different from each other. Comic actor Steve Zahn also shines as the timid Duane Martin, and Jeremy Davies makes for an excellent counterpoint to Dengler's exuberance, whether true or not. And the film also benefits by its fast pace. Despite being 125 minutes in length, the film never has `dead air'. It moves relentlessly from scene to scene, often being cut just before a typical Hollywood moment would arise in an action film. Thus, Herzog gives the viewer their Hollywood steak while not clogging their arteries with the mindless fat.
Yet, despite all its excellent points, at its heart, this film, unlike the documentary version of Dengler's life, is simply a deeper action film (a sort of leaner, meaner The Bridge On The River Kwai); it lacks the overall intellectual depth, probing, and agon that defines great art and suffuses Herzog's fictive classics from earlier in his career, even as it is a significantly better work of art than such a similarly themed and lauded film as The Deer Hunter. Rescue Dawn, however, and despite its near miss at greatness, is certainly a must see for those people who want to get a richer perspective on the Vietnam War, and deserves its place alongside Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket as unique visions of that war. But, to get an even fuller sense of what the war and Dieter Dengler were all about, watch Little Dieter Needs To Fly right afterwards. It's called eating the cake whilst having it, too; but, more than that, one will find that the cake is also surprisingly healthy and enlivening. Keep cooking, Werner!
Movie Review: RECOVER
Summary: 4 Stars
The true story of German immigrant turned American pilot Deiter Dengler, (Christian Bale), and his subsequent capture, confinement and escape from a POW camp during The Vietnam War, echoes elements of The Great Escape, and several other escape films, while delivering its own distinct 'war is hell' eulogy in its shadowy, claustrophobic and artful camera eye which defines the hero and his fellow prisoners as a Christ figure surrounded by grungy devotees. Scenes within the confines of their jungle clearing bamboo prison cell, as the prisoners huddle together and whisper secret plans for escape, are indebted to images of famous classical Christian paintings, like an up-close and personal Da Vinci's Last Supper. With Deiter's return to freedom, in the sanitary and joyous sanctity of his home base, he is lifted horizontally above the heads of his cheering fellow soldiers while draped in white hospital convalescent clothing, looking like Jesus rising from the dead. In one scene he wrestles with a large serpant in an attempt to eat it. Director Werner Herzog's religious interpretations are like chapters that lead to a harrowing and godless scene, where an enemy in enemy land, (Deiter), screams in horror to a sky litttered with unwitting rescue helicopters. It is at once, a hope filled and hopeless scene, a picture of war itself.
While following the conventions of escape films; The Deer Hunter, Midnight Express; the list goes on, Rescue Dawn is grittier and less majestic in its adventurous tone, keeping it's cinematic drive not in the panorama of heroic nature, but in the vistas of exotic beauty in the Thailand jungles where the movie was filmed, which reveal a hostile environment of flood swollen rivers, determined blood sucking slugs, and impassable jungle terrain, and the starkness of the mundane and military place of freedom where the adventure began. The movie follows the book on escape films with POW's on the verge of mental breakdown, a bowl of live worms for breakfast, discourse among escapees, emotional freedom ringing conclusion, but it does it all so artfully, you are never reminded of the other great escapes. In Deiter, played by Christian Bale, we have not a disillusioned Vietnam soldier on the verge of living a lifelong nightmare, but of the quality John Wayne boasted, but without the bravura and impossible manhood. You can picture him barbequing in his backyard with the wife and neighbors, leading a carefree life when the war is over.
The film ends without revealing the fate of Deiter's fellow prisoners which is upsetting. It also offers a lingering question which may suggest topical references to our current state of military affairs. There is a psyche-bizarre scene after a torture session where Deiter seems in compliance with his recent captors as they stand near a body of water filled with, what looked like minnow sized sharks. It is suggestive of the prisoners signing papers declaring America an evil imperialistic nation after an intense psychological torment, hence their confinement, as opposed to their demise. Guantanamo Bay comes to mind.
Movie Review: 'If it is full, empty it. If it is empty, fill it.'
Summary: 4 Stars
So speaks Dieter Dengler when asked for comment at the end of his journey of jungle captivity in Laos. RESCUE DAWN is as much about the courage and fortitude of a captured soldier during wartime as it is about a true incident. From the inherent optimism of pilot Dieter Dengler (played with commitment and finesse by Christian Bale) the story transcends biopic and offers lessons for life in general; the human spirit can be indefatigable.
Writer/director Werner Herzog has expanded his 1997 documentary about Dieter Dengler and in doing so he has provided us entry into the psyches of soldiers captured by the enemy and the extraordinarily trying conditions in which they survive. The optimistic and eager Dengler is sent on a classified mission to bomb certain targets in Laos in 1965 with his fellow pilots including his best friend Spook (Toby Huss). Denlger is shot down and captured, interrogated, tortured, and placed in a prison with fellow inmates Duane (Steve Zahn in a career changing superb performance), Gene (the emaciated and excellent Jeremy Davies), Phisit (Abhijati 'Meuk' Jusakul), and Procet (Lek Chaiyan Chunsuttiwat). The living conditions are deplorable: the men are starved, chained together making even the possibility of caring for bodily functions negligible, and the moral is low. Dengler changes that using his ingenuity and immediately plans for escape. Duane aids Dengler but Gene fears the consequences of an aborted escape attempt. Yet with Dengler's expertise and cunning the escape into the jungle is planned and is essentially successful - until the other enemy (the jungle) reduces the forces to one. As Dengler is rescued he is left with the ghosts of his fellow inmates, a factor that will haunt him and alter his life after rescue.
Christian Bale's performance is near perfect as are the performances by Zahn and Davies. The film feels too long at times but that also suggests that director Herzog wants the audience to understand the mental deterioration and stagnant time cycle that cripples prisoners of war. The atmosphere of the prison camp is presented well and if the ending of the film becomes a bit too 'Hollywood', after the 2+ hours of prison confinement that is somewhat of a relief. RESCUE DAWN is a powerful film with some of the best acting of the year's crop and certainly deserves the attention of a wide audience. Grady Harp, November 07