TIFF Report: RESCUE DAWN Review

Not aiming to be a typical war film, Rescue Dawn is more of a survival film: Survival of the body, yes, but more so survival of the soul under relentless conditions. There are the faintest of echoes to Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One in that regard. First, there is a visceral (and gorgeous) plane crash at the beginning of the film. There are 15 minutes of casually merciless torture of Dieter by his captors before the middle section of the banal repetition of the internment in the prison camp. Finally, last half of the film is hunted men clawing, grasping and crawling their way through punishing miles of jungle. Christian Bale is an intense actor, and brings all of his sizable skills to bear to give Dengler a grim-optimism, occasionally peppered with a charming smile, under one harrowing set of circumstances after another.

The middle section of the film is the weakest. While the ensemble of actors (including excellent performances from the always interesting Steve Zahn and always similar Jeremy Davies) is very good, the tension is diffuse compared to the opening and closing sections of the film. Like Aguirre, the Jungle is the both the prison and the executioner and Rescue Dawn shines by pushing forward, not standing still. However here, the film is more intimate than distancing, and strangely that makes Rescue Dawn the weaker film of the two. The final third of the film it is Zahn, not Bale that morphs his features into the craggy and haunted look of Herzog regular Klaus Kinski and it is in a word, uncanny.

Of interest in these anti-American times, especially from European filmmakers, is that Yankee heroism here is portrayed by surviving the war in body and spirit, not by killing a host of enemies. While being German Born, Dieter is all-American in mind and heart.

The set of circumstances of Rescue Dawn are small in scope by nature, and while the film is certainly an intense experience, it is in the end, a somewhat minor entry in the war film canon of films.

Herzog’s adopted mother had died that day, so he was understandably choked up during the Q&A after the film which did not offer much insight into either the film or how it was made.