Film

Perhaps it’s unfair to measure Rescue Dawn against Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man, but he practically demands the comparison by once again visiting his career-spanning theme of man’s insane struggle against merciless nature. In real-life hero Dieter Dengler, an American pilot who escaped from a Laotian prison-camp in 1966 and hiked through the jungle to safety, Herzog has another protagonist whose heroic outlines conceal a touch (or more) of madness. But the Herzogian grandeur has been scaled back to fit a more conventional escape-from-prison-camp drama that won’t quite satisfy the Herzog buffs or those seeking simple uplift.

As portrayed by Bale, Dieter at first seems like just another Air Force pilot from the Top Gun mold. He’s arrogant, roguish and patriotic, in that order. But after he crashes on a bombing mission in the Laotian jungle and gets captured, his hero act starts to look like weird mania.

In a prison camp in the middle of the jungle, Dieter encounters other captured soldiers (Zahn, Davies) who look like emaciated Robinson Crusoes and talk like, well, stir-crazy POWs. He persuades, cajoles and threatens them into helping him with a daring escape plan, which eventually gets us to some remarkably claustrophobic sequences that convey just how overgrown and impassable the Laotian jungle is. But even here, the clash of fanatical hubris and implacable nature never rises to Herzog’s usual operatic ecstasies. It’s as if Herzog’s themes, like his hero, have been deprived of full freedom of movement.