Rescue Dawn - Review

Director: Werner Herzog
Writer: Werner Herzog
Starring: Christian Bale/Steve Zahn
Runtime: 120 minutes

If you’re looking for an old-fashioned film where the good guy comes out on top, Rescue Dawn is right up your alley. It isn’t a poignant film, and doesn’t try to be. It’s about a Navy pilot who gets shot down in Laos during the early stages of the Vietnam War. He’s captured, gets treated like garbage, and then he escapes.

You can’t get more straightforward than that. At the beginning of the film, we find Christian Bale as a lean, healthy All-American pilot. We learn that this is to be his first mission into enemy territory, and like all young guns, he’s nervous but looking forward to it.

A few moments later, he’s probably wishing he hadn’t made the flight, or maybe even joined the Navy, because he is shot down behind enemy lines. A small pursuit follows, and then he is thrown into a POW camp.

It was interesting to see how the film presented his captors and their treatment of POWs. It has become the norm in all forms of media to depict enemies of the United States as well rounded characters. Yes, they might force you to eat maggots. Sure, they might stick a bayonet in your crotch. But, hey, nobody’s perfect.

Postcards from Iwo Jima was a total farce in that respect. It depicted the Japanese as virtual victims of the US. No movie today would show the Japanese as they mainly were: men who executed their prisoners (civilian and military) through torture, beheading, and bayoneting in the stomach. Sometimes they burned their victims alive. Other times they marched them until they dropped. At no time were prisoners treated with anything bordering on respect. The Geneva Convention might as well have been written on toilet paper.

The North Vietnamese have not gotten off so lucky in the film world. The Deer Hunter was quite candid (some would say unkind) in its depiction of the Vietnamese, but make no mistake: when Americans are captured by her enemies, they are in for a hell of a rough ride. The Pacific islands, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq. None of these places have been home to an altogether merciful captor.

Christian Bale goes through hell in Rescue Dawn. It isn’t laid on thick. It merely shows you what it would have been like to be captured by the enemy in Vietnam. Horrible food. Beatings. No sanitation. The threat of being shot at a moment’s notice. How these POWs survived it intact is beyond me. It would drive most men crazy, as it does Jeremy Davies, who plays a POW in Bale’s camp.

The film has a certain documentary quality to it. The camera-work is lean and by the book. An establishing shot here, a close-up shot there. Bale and his comrades are allowed to act, without a lot of camera tricks getting in the way. I was surprised by the lack of quality in the flying shots at the beginning of the film. I’m sure the film had a large budget, but the money wasn’t spent there. That’s small potatoes, though, because the film pays off later on.

Bale and his fellow escapee, played by Steve Zaun, are very believable. They are so thin and gaunt by the end of the film that it made me worry about their health in real life. Is it really necessary for actors to go to these extremes? While it is nice to read about their dedication in Variety magazine, I’m not sure I would have believed Bale any less if he’d had an extra 20 pounds on him. Method acting is fine, but I’m curious if one day an actor might method act himself right into the hospital or worse.

While we’re on the subject, I did take issue with the dog in the film: he stays as plump and chipper from beginning to end, even though the guards themselves are starving. Certainly the guards would have eaten the dog’s food, if not the dog itself, once the rations ran dry.

Bale has a certain quality about him that is hard to nail down. I detested him in American Psycho, but that might have been a by-product of not liking the film in general. In Batman Begins, I thought he was great, but wasn’t sure why. Again in The Prestige, and once more in this film. There’s something about his voice and his manner that is very good, but I can’t get a handle on it, and so I will surrender and merely say that it is interesting to watch him ply his craft.

Rescue Dawn is not meant for anyone who wants a deep understanding of the Vietnam War, or anything else for that matter. It is a simple story about a man and his will to survive. It is simply told, and it is simply quite good.