Camden New Journal - Movies: Rescue Dawn

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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with WILLIAM HALL
Published:22 November 2007

True story of Vietnam pilot’s jungle nightmare

RESCUE DAWN
Directed by Werner Herzog
Certificate 12a

CHRISTIAN Bale turns in a startling performance as Dieter Dengler, a US navy pilot shot down on an illegal bombing raid over the mountains in the early stages of the Vietnam War.
Captured by the Viet Cong, he spends six months in a bamboo prison, taunted and reviled, and subjected to torture that would have broken another man.
His captors toy with him for their own amusement, indulging in such gruesome pastimes as hanging him upside down with an ants’ nest tied to his head, or dragging him through the paddy fields behind a water buffalo.
Dieter discovers other GIs, human skeletons scarcely alive, and knows he must get away. Finally he seizes his opportunity, and makes a break for freedom with another emaciated prisoner (Steve Zahn), both of them living like hunted animals in their gruelling hike through the jungle.
The bond between the two men, initially at odds with one another, becomes painfully touching the closer they stumble to freedom.
Amazingly, all this actually happened.
Dieter died in 2001, a Purple Heart hero.
But the true impact of Werner Herzog’s gripping saga is in what the nightmare experience does to his subject. He starts out as a cocky young top gun, and emerges a haggard, bearded figure who has been to hell and back – yet returning as living proof of the triumph of the human spirit.

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