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What does it say about a story if a filmmaker decides to revisit the same one twice? Well, Werner Herzog did just that when he made a film called Rescue Dawn (2006), which is based on a documentary he directed in 1998 called Little Dieter Needs To Fly.
I will only talk about the latter film here, and will not refer to the fact that it is based on a true story. This is partly because to do so would be to open an entirely different can of worms that has to do with reality versus fiction. Let it be said that any story-teller sometimes needs to take a little bit of artistic licence (if you will) in order to render the story in its best possible form.
Rescue Dawn falls into the sub-genre of the 'escaped prisoner of war' stories. If you do not like this genre, you will not like the film. It is made in the classic form of 'pilot gets shot down, pilot runs like hell, gets captured, suffers, plots his escape, escapes, suffers more, and is finally rescued'.
So what's the point of watching this film? Well, as with all Herzog films it is for the strange and deeply bizarre characters that inhabit them. Christian Bale plays Dieter Dengler the young, happy go-lucky, slightly annoyingly starry eyed pilot who gets shot down on his first mission over Laos at the very beginning of what would become the Vietnam war.
When he is captured by the Viet Cong and taken over land to a guarded camp, he meets five other prisoners. Two are Asian, but not Vietnamese, their nationality is never discovered, and two are Americans.
As with all such camps there is already an established hierarchy when Dieter arrives. Gene (Jeremy Davies) is the leader, a bit of a bully, and obviously also a bit mentally unstable. Also present is Steve Zahn's character Duane Martin, a gentle, quite tender hearted person with chronic stomach problems.
As Dieter begins to plot his escape he creates a conflict with Gene who insists that if they sit tight they will be rescued regardless. As months pass and no rescue happens, the other prisoners slowly start to gravitate towards Dieter's indomitable spirit. Finally, they all agree that they should plan their escape for 4 July, American Independence day.
When they finally do break free, many things go wrong, and Dieter and Duane find themselves on their own, shoeless, with two guns and an approaching ferocious monsoon.
I will not detail the journey of these two men and Dieter's eventual rescue, but I will say that it is deeply moving, and the end in particular is spectacularly Herzogian in its strangeness and dissonance.
In a film like this, a great deal rests on the performance of the actors, and they are extremely powerful. Watching them, one is brought viscerally into the world of the prisoner of war, the cosmic miseries, the little pleasures, the petty jealousies, and the camaraderie that comes with this kind of bond.
One can only be thankful that Herzog, in his eccentricity, decided to make this film twice.
