Blog of Tigis

Lt. Dieter Dengler was a young US army pilot in early Vietnam war. He was captured when his airplane crashed during a mission and taken as prisoner of war in vietcong camp. This movie tells the story about how he lived as POW and eventually managed to escape.

Lt. Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) lived in the camp with only several other prisoners. It’s quite a small camp. This movie really shows how they interract to each other and share almost everything. Finally Dieter came up with an escape plan. They managed to escape the camp but unfortunately they have to split their way. Dieter tried to reach the river together with Duane (Steve Zahn). Will they succeed to escape the country?

Rescue Dawn has done a good job in portraying the real situation in south east Asia. The shooting took place almost entirely in Thailand. We can see the real tropical forest almost in the whole movie. The actors, especially Christian Bale and Steve Zahn, worked hard to adapt with the original wild jungle setting. Sometimes the jungle become the main actor itself.

Werner Herzog, who directed this movie, spend a lot of time in describing the interraction between the prisoners (and between the prisoners and the guards as well). He did it in his unique way. Sometimes I couldn’t help but feel a little bit strange to watch them. It’s a tragic part of anyone’s life. But Herzog didn’t try to push it that way. Instead he approached the character very lightly. Almost felt like comedy in some part. But that way he managed to give the audiences different kind of sympathy to the characters.

You won’t see any battle in this movie despite the setting takes place during the early years of Vietnam war. Only at the beginning when it shows Dieter’s mission in which his airplane crashed. For the rest of the movie you will only see several characters interraction. No big set, no high number of extras, no fancy effects. Just plain characters, the interraction between them, and obviously some wild tropical forest.

Title : Rescue Dawn

Director : Werner Herzog

Cast : Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, Jeremy Davies, Abhijati Jusakul, Lek Caiyan Chunsuttiwat

Genre : drama

My Rating : 3 out of 5

Note :

• there has been some debate about how this movie portrayed the character of Gene. In this movie Gene was portrayed as a trouble man and has unstable emotion. They protested and claimed that Gene was actually a very good man and held a major part of the escape plan. There’s only 1 survivor who’s still alive from that camp and he regarded Gene very highly.
• Werner Herzog previously directed a documentary movie “Little Dieter Needs to Fly” which also based on the same true story of Lt Dieter Dengler
• there’s a beautiful scene at the beginning of this movie where the camera captured the succesive explosion of napalm bombs from the air in the village. The combination of great picture and haunting music score makes it very dramatic. The best scene in my point of view.

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