Ten years ago, German expatriate Werner Herzog—now a U.S. resident—directed the documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. The subject of the film was Dieter Dengler, another German expatriate who emigrated to the U.S. in order to become a pilot. As a Navy flyer, he was shot down while on his first combat mission, crash landing in the Laotian jungle during the early years of the Viet Nam War. After several months, he escaped from a POW camp, crossed into Thailand, and eventually rejoined his Navy unit.

Rescue Dawn is a dramatized retelling of Dengler’s story, starring Christian Bale as Dengler.

Thirty years ago and more, Herzog began a remarkable and prolific film career with arthouse classics like Aguirre, Wrath of God, Stroszek, Nosferatu the Vampyre, and Woyzeck. In 1982, he directed Fitzcarraldo, an epic tale about a man’s struggle to move a boat over a mountain. Many critics saw the film—and much of Herzog’s work, as well—as a commentary about film itself, and the struggle of the artistic process.

On this self-referential level, Rescue Dawn works as well as any of Herzog’s films.

The subject of the film, Dengler, perseveres under the most obscene of conditions to accomplish something no one would believe possible if they didn’t know it to be true—and even many of those involved in the effort are the biggest nay-sayers. In true Herzog fashion, the production itself placed almost obscene demands on the performers and—one can only imagine, given the tales of what Klaus Kinski endured for years as Herzog’s alter ego, and given the tortured souls that actors tend to possess in the first place—most likely drove one or more of its stars to the very limits of the human spirit.

Further, the film itself is something of an ordeal for the audience—much as Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, and others before it. Think, perhaps, of a Terrence Malick or Carroll Ballard film tied to a bullwhip or a mace. Think of lyric brutality.

And then imagine Herzog thinking, rather dispassionately, that any audience which imagines itself as suffering more than Dengler—or himself, as an artist—is not much worth worrying about. I’d say that the smart money is that you won’t much care for Rescue Dawn; and the smarter money would be bet that Herzog isn’t making this film to satisfy a broad audience. We shouldn’t ever confuse Herzog with Spielberg, for instance.

But if you like cinema that demands a great deal of you, that doesn’t let you off the hook with ten-second character development, a half-hour hook, and three dazzling chase sequences, then Rescue Dawn may just be for you. It may well be Herzog’s most purely commercial work to date—a point that is probably wholly irrelevant.

Expect, perhaps, a film that might have been made by a less cerebral and more earthy Eastwood. But don’t expect gratuitousness of any sort from Rescue Dawn, any more than you would of an Eastwood film. There aren’t any gruesome Casino Royale torture scenes; there aren’t any mind-rending Deer Hunter Russian roulette sequences; even the actual escape is terribly tame by Rambo standards. Just expect healthy doses of verisimilitude—tons of staged non-reality that smacks more of the truth than anything you’re likely to see from reality TV.

Also don’t expect some left-wing bleeding-heart anti-war propaganda. There’s nothing here that will make your heart swell in patriotic fervor, if you aren’t already so disposed; but the film also makes no attempt to denigrate or psychoanalyze those who have served their country in times of war. It doesn’t even attempt to make many generalized statements about war or the cost of war.

What Rescue Dawn does, though, is return once again to one of Herzog’s favorite themes: the need for man to realize that he does not dominate nature, but that he is a force of nature. Early on the film, Dengler and other aviators watch a Navy training film about jungle survival. The narrator emphasizes the need to “make nature work for” the soldier—as the pilots laugh about tactics like drinking rain water from palm leaves. Later, one of Dengler’s fellow prisoners tells him that the POW camp’s walls are not the obstacle: “The jungle is the prison.”

True enough—if one thinks that one is somehow of a different nature than the jungle. Dengler himself observes that “the quick have their sleepwalkers, and so do the dead.” Rather than sleepwalking through the POW experience, and ending up dead in the end anyway, he accepts that’s it’s within man’s nature to be just as savage as his environment—and he summons the full capacity of the human will, not to overcome the jungle, but to become one with it. “Just when you think you can’t go on any longer,” Dengler knows, you find that you just do, because the alternative is surrender.

Where does this strength come from in Dengler when it so obviously fails his fellow prisoners? It’s hard to say. But as Rescue Dawn would have it, at least, Dengler possessed it from the time he was a child, watching Allied fighters strafe Dresden. As he looked a low-flying pilot in the eye, he saw not an enemy, but an opportunity. He wanted to be a pilot, too. We might find it odd, as Dengler’s friends do, that “a guy tries to kill you and you want his job.” But somehow, Dengler doesn’t worry about death, revenge, and victimhood. His focus is on life and opportunity.

That’s really something. And it’s a very humanist something. Sadly, it’s a brand of humanism that’s mostly useful in times of war and violent natural disaster—but not much of any other time. I can’t help thinking of the closing lines of Apocalypse Now! “The horror. The horror.”

It’s hard for me to be inspired (or entertained) much by humanity’s more horrific nature.

Rescue Dawn is rated PG-13 for “some sequences of intense war violence and torture.” That’s pretty fair; at the same time, I think knowing your teens is probably pretty important with this film all the same. It might traumatize some younger teens—and for some the same age, it might be just the kind of wakening trauma that the doctor ordered. Don’t be too put off by the torture label, though. Herzog has done a very tasteful and tactful job of dramatizing this story. Just don’t expect it to be all that exciting.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Greg attended a press screening of Rescue Dawn.