Word: dieter
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Bale isn't nuts like Kinski, but he has the insane dedication Herzog asks of his performers; he lost 55 lbs. for his role in Rescue Dawn. The movie is a remake, in a way, of Herzog's 1997 documentary Little Dieter Loves to Fly, about a German boy, Dieter Dengler, whose home in the Black Forest was bombed by U.S. planes; he caught a glimpse of the pilot, "like a vision ... like an imaginary being," and decided that he wanted to fly--a theme in many Herzog docs. Dengler went to the U.S., joined the Navy and was shot...
...went college, joined the navy, won his wings?and was shot down on his first mission over Laos in 1966, well before the war in Southeast Asia tragically expanded. Captured and imprisoned in what may well be the most horrendous POW camp ever shown in a film, Dieter somehow managed to escape through the jungle - an odyssey that is, if anything, more gut-wrenching than his incarceration...
...provide ample and thrilling testimony to the uniqueness of his enterprise. He is willing to go places no other filmmaker goes and he simply has no competitors when it comes to strenuous risk-taking. About a decade ago he made a hypnotic documentary about Dengler's exploits, entitled Little Dieter Needs to Fly. In it, Dengler returned to the scenes of his Laotian exploits and recounted them in the matter of fact way that heroes so often affect when they are encouraged to reflect on their pasts. Now, in Rescue Dawn, Herzog offers a fictionalized account of the same story...
...Most of all, we miss the living presence of Dieter Dengler, who died five years ago. When we met him in Little Dieter, he was driving in a solid car, living in a stolid middle class house, having spent the rest of his life as a test pilot (he managed to survive four more plane crashes), apparently unmarked by his youthful adventures. That came to be the most heroic thing about him - his ability to embrace normalcy, to talk about the past almost as if it were a story that happened to someone else. There was a tranquility about...
...documentary version of the same story. Werner Herzog is a great and demanding filmmaker - sort of a Joseph Conrad for our time - and there is nothing notably wrong with Rescue Dawn. If you have the stomach for it, it will hold your attention. But it is still Little Dieter, toying with the unspoken enigmas of heroism, which elevates this tale to the level...