Rescue Dawn

I am told Herzog movies (of which I have only seen three, including this one, and so do not count myself qualified to proclaim great knowledge of the director) are remarkable as spiritual meditations of the distance (or indeed, closeness) between man and god, and man and nature. The indomitable spirit of man, the uncontrollable wrath of god, the eternal tension between the two - that kind of jazz. As such I've read some reviews disappointed with Rescue Dawn for not being of the usual standard Herzog maintains within his films - in terms of haunting and ineffable representations of philosophies and spiritual truths.

Which is fair enough, and I would fair-warn those of you who know Herzog well and love him precisely for aforementioned reasons: apparently, Rescue Dawn is a disappointment. That disclaimer out of the way, and I can with a clear conscious state: I thought it was wicked-bad-kick-ass, and totally fucking cool. A thoroughly entertaining piece of viscera.

It deals with a German-American fighter pilot, Dieter Dengler, shot down and imprisoned in the jungles of Laos during the opening stages (the violent overture, if you will) of the Vietnam war. Dieter is tortured, strung up, starved and imprisoned (I didn't come away with the feeling that the Laotian people were monstrous and unjustified though, given that the opening sequences of the movie depict American fighter pilots bombing Laotian villages. I mean, that's not so much playing fair in itself if you think about it, and would be enough to get me a bit pissed off with the foreign muck). There's a sequence early on when, bound to a tree, his captors fire shots with a rifle over the top of his shoulder, leading Dieter to scream "Don't you ever do that again! No! Next time you just shoot me!" It's incredible, and terrifying, and I found myself empathically terrified by the notion of being taunted by your own mortality over and over again: maybe today, the rifle slips, we shot your head off. Fucks your uncle.

But Dieter is possessant of a seemingly-endless reservoir of determination, optimism and ingenuity, and, when he reaches the prison camp and is met by emaciated and now-hopeless American fighter pilots (including Steve Zahn, very good, and Jeremy Davies - painfully thin) who tell him there's no escaping "you could get past the guards, but you couldn't survive the horrors of the jungle." Dieter listens with keen interest, nods, grins, and is undeterred: he will escape.

You flutter between feeling, vicariously, harrowed by how horrible his experience is, and joyed at the ingenuity with which Dieter overcomes obstacle after obstacle. Its refreshing to encounter an actioner flick in which the hero survives by his cunning as opposed to his ammo stock-pile. That it is based on a true story (recounted by Dieter himself in an earlier Herzog doco, "Little Dieter Needs To Fly") makes it all the more inspiring.

The ending suffers due to the mad-Bavarian helmer's decision to try and give Dieter some adulation after so extreme an ordeal - but it feels saccharine and trite given what has come before. Discount that and you have a solid, exciting, terrifying, oddly hilarious night at the movies. Yay.