Not Another Vietnam Movie

Venus Zine, July 24th, 2007

Werner Herzog isn’t a name you usually associate with Hollywood. His niche has always been in the realm of the weird and wonderful, depicting protagonists — both in his narrative films and in his documentaries — who do not conform to the status quo. He gave us access to the life and death of nature activist Timothy Treadwell in the documentary Grizzly Man, made a violent and chaotic film starring dwarves in Even Dwarves Started Small, and documented his turbulent lifelong relationship with German actor Klaus Kinski through various films they made together, most notably Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, Wrath of God. Herzog is eccentric and his films are esoteric — two things Hollywood most certainly is not.

However, good films occasionally do come out of Hollywood, and it is with this in mind that you should watch Rescue Dawn — Herzog’s dramatic interpretation of his own 1988 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Little Dieter reconstructed the story of Dieter Dengler, a German-American soldier who crashed over Laos during a secret firebombing mission at the start of the Vietnam war. He subsequently became imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp. Rescue Dawn provides a much needed dramatization of this captivating story with Dengler played by a superb Christian Bale.

Herzog sticks to the facts as told by Dengler himself, and no aspect of Rescue Dawn is embellished from the original film.

It’s not a Vietnam film in the traditional sense like Apocalypse Now or Platoon. Herzog offers no position on his or Dengler’s attitude towards the war itself. Rescue Dawn is about endurance, partly against human force and, as is often the case with Herzog, partly against nature. You might almost say that Dengler’s real battle begins when he escapes from the camp and has to suffer through the treacherous jungles of Laos.

The only time Rescue Dawn comes close to being tainted by Hollywood occurs right at the end — condemned by many for its jingoism — but even this only strikes me as jingoistic for Herzog. For Hollywood, the jingoism in Rescue Dawn is subtle. The rest of the film is filled with long periods of inaction and isolation, and some beautiful moments of man's interaction with nature, recapturing the very best of Herzog's stunning ’70s films.