Written and Directed by Werner Herzog

Cast
Christian Bale as Dieter Dengler
Steve Zahn as Duane
Jeremy Davies as Gene

Rated PG-13 for some sequences of intense war violence and torture

For 5 months in 1965, US Air Force pilot Dieter Dengler endured starvation and torture as a Laotian prisoner of war.  Then, for 23 days, he battled his way through the jungle, sharing a single sole of a shoe with a fellow escapee and eating things you do not want to think about eating to survive.  I can't imagine how he did it, but thanks to Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn, I can at least imagine what he endured.  It's one of the great immersive survival movies, and if it proves to be a little slow and to contain one really misguided performance, it also achieves a level of punishing realism one rarely experiences at the movies.

German immigrant Dengler (Christian Bale) grew up watching Allied bombers pummel his home and somehow ended up dreaming of joining them.  He got his wish as an Air Force pilot participating in the pre-Vietnam War bombing of Laos.  On his first mission, he's shot down and falls into enemy hands.  After much abuse, he's dragged to a makeshift prisoner of war camp with a few other inmates including Duane Martin (Steve Zahn) and Eugene DeBruin (Jeremy Davies).  To the man they are broken and fearful, but Dieter doesn't know the meaning of either word.  From the moment he arrives, he's plotting escape and slowly but surely wins everyone else over.  But a successful escape would only be the beginning.  As Duane ominously reminds him, it's not their little bamboo hut that prevents escape:  the jungle around them is the real prison.

For a movie with such a deliberate pace, Rescue Dawn is short on characterization.  We never learn all that much about Dieter or his fellow prisoners.  Instead, Herzog's camera is content to sit back and observe, and that strategy pays big dividends as one nasty detail after another piles up.  The film makes no special effort to spotlight the horrors of eating a bowl of worms when its' all the prisoners' jailers will provide or the most horribly realistic leech removal scene I've ever witnessed, and these moments are all the more ghastly because of the even-handed approach.  Adding an extra layer of realism is the amazing weight loss the stars were willing to endure:  watching familiar faces like Bale and Zahn starved into human skeletons before our eyes is truly shocking.

Even though Dieter doesn't offer a lot of hooks to hang onto as a character, Bale plays him like he doesn't notice.  It's a unique and spunky performance in a role that would have left many actors simply pouting and staring into the distance.  It's essential that we see a certain playfulness to the pre-torture Dieter since the reserves of optimism that carried him through must have been pretty much bottomless.  Zahn surprises with previously unseen dramatic depth:  the prison camp experience has broken Duane, but he does absorb enough of Dieter's courage to keep going.  But there's a real misstep in the third major role, with Davies playing the crazed Gene pretty much 100% as Charles Manson.  It's a weird, distracting choice made even stranger by my discovery upon checking his resume afterwards that Davies PLAYED Manson just three years ago in a TV movie.  Even without the creepy resemblance, it's a shame that while Bale, Zahn and their other costars are as loose and spontaneous as you'll ever see actors in a war movie, Davies is all tics, showiness and “acting”.

I had some issues with the falling action in the last few scenes.  Even if every last thing that happens in them is true, the brutal humanity of what's come before asks for a more respectful wrap-up than the old-school military wackiness we get.  Again, I'm not sure Herzog feels like he needs to “set a tone” and that when wacky characters are on screen, he lets them be wacky.  Toby Huss's pilot Spook is an ironic hoot early on when he mocks survival training films Dieter will later wish he'd watched more closely, but his reappearance at the end is most unwelcome.

Ironically, for all it'll be discussed as an alternative to Summer Movie spectacle, what Rescue Dawn does best is deliver a visceral experience.  Like a Cast Away with the good sense not to follow Tom Hanks home, it allows us to sit comfortably beside our drink holder and vicariously experience what it would take to survive in a place where no man should be able to.  And to discover that Dieter Dengler, who passed away in 2001, must have been one hell of a guy.