Platicsco
Good story, Not enough for a whole film
Aneesa Wardle
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
Mandeep Tyson
The acting in this movie is really good.
nlytnd_1
What a perplexingly weird movie. What makes it even weirder is, it's based on a real person and event. Typically if a movie is based around a real event, the movie goes for more of a realism type approach, but I'm not sure what the the movie was trying to achieve? Did they not want to depress the audience, so they decided to cover this story in a way that the audience wouldn't have to be emotionally impacted by it? Where to begin? When Dieter (Christian Bale) gets captured and brought to the leader (not sure the leaders title). His demeanor was that of a US teenager in Europe for spring break or at least the way movies like to portray American teens over seas. Cocky, like the world owes them something and just immature, whereas I can't imagine anyone in a situation where they were captured acting like that. It gets weirder as it goes into the various torture thing they do to Dieter... it's done in more of a comedic way, rather than upsetting. The fact that it's based on a real person makes me think that no, and someone completely dropped the ball and if I had to guess that someone was Christian Bale. As if he was incapable of playing this role and it came out in more of a dark comedic style. And they went a little over board with the insanity part of it. Then when is friend gets his head hacked off, it's not a sad moment and it isn't sad for Dieter either. Anyways, I give up trying to figure this movie out. It felt as though the movie was on anti depressants.... no emotion whatsoever in reference to things that should have been really upsetting.
Floated2
Rescue Dawn single-minded focus exposes some flaws, such as the film's disinterest in Dengler's captors who are, like Dengler, slowly starving to death and who think they are defending their country. But that focus also makes the story gripping - there is danger everywhere and a sense that Dengler (Christian Bale) is so resourceful that he thinks of almost everything but that it's the "almost" that could get him killed.The film is inspiring and gripping, but it plays it cool. It doesn't pump up Dengler's heroism, for instance, because it knows it doesn't need to. It doesn't strain to make big statements about Vietnam or to assert a political argument because it knows all those arguments have been made.
SnoopyStyle
It's 1965 and nobody thought much of Vietnam. Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) is on his first mission to bomb the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos. He crashes and is captured. He refuses to sign a confession for the Province Governor. He is tortured and sent to a sadistic prison camp in the middle of the jungle. The most sadistic of the guards is Little Hitler. There are prisoners from many places suffering many years. He organizes an escape plan with Duane Martin (Steve Zahn) but Gene DeBruin (Jeremy Davies) opposes the plan.Director Werner Herzog has made a shockingly realistic portrayal of the inhuman conditions. There is a realness to the jungle location and the locals. There are some reported inaccuracies of the real people being portrayed. The movie itself is a well-acted, compelling, awe-inspiring human drama. The acting from everybody is superb. Herzog is brilliant and the movie is impeccable.
secondtake
Rescue Dawn (2006)A well made, fairly routine war and prisoner-of-war film. I suppose nothing is routine in these matters, but the film makes it all weirdly familiar: captured, struggling to survive, plotting an escape, and escaping. Hey, this isn't news: it's in the title.I'm not sure if Christian Bale is what you'd call a great actor—he's a convincing Batman, at least in the latest versions, but he's up and down in his other movies. Here he tries his best, and you can feel him acting his heart out. He even seems to eat bugs and bites a snake (or close to it) to make it convincing. But there might be such a thing as trying too hard, revealing a lack of something more intuitive and convincing.But he is the movie, so get used to it. And he's not terrible, even if he has an inexplicable grin half the time. Let's not forget this is a Werner Herzog movie, and that means it's got something special here that great directors bring out whether they want to or not. Here it's a combination of violence and human excess. The excess is not just violence, but thoughtlessness, and kind of childish cruelty that Herzog shows both the captors enjoy and the townspeople seem to at least put up with. I don't know if this is exposing the horrors of war, as some say this movie does, but it does show the willingness of the director to go someplace uncomfortable, to stir the view.Stirred I was. It's a good movie. It has such irksome flaws I have trouble seeing the strengths, too, but the evocation of a Laotian prison camp is decent enough. I think his idea of fellow prisoners is pure Hollywood, however, and it seems more like "The Great Escape' than it should, given all the differences in cultures—and directors.How does it end? Hmph. Wait and see.
