Rescue Dawn

When Dieter Dengler was a boy in WWII Germany, he decided that he wanted to be a pilot. At age 18 he moved to America and in 1965 became a fighter pilot in Vietnam. On his first mission, his plane was shot down, and Dieter found himself fighting for his life in a Vietcong prison camp and then in the jungle. In 1997, Werner Herzog directed a documentary film about Dieter Dengler called Little Dieter Has to Fly. A decade later, he returns to tell the story in a fiction film. Herzog characteristically deals with the effect of the struggle to survive on his hero’s sanity – although, unlike his features from the 70s (Fitzcaraldo, Aguirra, the Wrath of God) here Herzog maintains a sense of normalcy. He designs the film as a long and difficult journey of survival, directed with restraint, and aided by the impressive performance of Christian Bale in the lead role.