Keswick Film Festival

Synopsis

Although it parallels an old-fashioned prisoner-of-war movie, Rescue Dawn becomes much more because of writer-director Werner Herzog's admiration for the remarkable true story of Dieter Dengler, the German-born U.S. Navy pilot shot down over Laos in 1966, who escaped a remote jungle prison camp after months of brutal captivity. Dengler at first seems a conventional action-movie hero: handsome, resourceful, brave and optimistic. But the more time spent with him, the more eccentricities he reveals...

Herzog has found in Christian Bale an actor capable of conveying the intensity and visionary quality of the typical Herzogian hero, in the lushness of the Laotian jungle a wonderful backdrop, and in his nod towards the Iraq war a most thought-provoking movie.