Just the Ticket #151: Rescue Dawn

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster

I have an odd relationship with musicals and war movies, Ticketholders.

I used to love musicals, mostly because they were animated Disney movies and I didn't know that was what they were. I thought Chicago was amazing, even though I knew it was a musical, because it was amazing. But then I endured The Producers and it made me want to get an Egyptian lobotomy with a rusty paperclip. I only watched the first five minutes of Moulin Rouge because even though I was a horny young adult when it came out and I liked the "Lady Marmalade" cover and it was directed by the "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)" guy, I felt like the marketing had lied to me by not saying up front that it was a jukebox musical, but it was The Producers that turned me off to the feature film musical genre completely. Sure, I still liked Once when it came out, and La La Land was enjoyable even though I knew going in that it was a musical, but I don't feel the need to watch them again or keep up with the genre when something new comes out.

Likewise but opposite, I grew up hating war movies. To little kid me, they were all the same: explosive noise and dirt-blinded chaos while grease-painted, over-oiled lookalikes shouted and shot at each other from pre-dug graves (trenches) for hours on end until the director or budget constraints said it was time to stop. I know I kind of liked the Rambo sequels as a kid, and I have vague memories of parts of Saving Private Ryan that I think I tolerated. But just like The Producers ruined musicals for me, today's film was the moment that I remember thinking, I like war movies now!

And this is the moment that I ask you to please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your "I like this genre now!" movie at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't end up in a war camp because I can't afford sunscreen and my tan is too dark, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Let's get the juvenile stuff out of the way real quick; it's hard to take this movie seriously when the title comes up as Rescue Dawn "Inspired by true events in the life of Dieter Dengler" (played here by Christian Bale). Yes, our main character for the next two hours is named Dieter Dengler. And yes, there was a real, German-born American Navy pilot whose actual name was Dieter Dengler. And finally, yes, Rescue Dawn director, famed documentarian, and guest voice actor in The Boondocks, Warner Herzog, did a documentary before this called Little Dieter Needs to Fly.

Are we all done chuckling at the man whose name makes him sound like a rejected Boogie Nights character or a 90s wrestler with a porn star gimmick?

Good. Let's talk about the movie!

Coming back to it almost twenty years later in a world with better internet, it's historically inaccurate for the sake of making Dengler some kind of quick-thinking MacGyver-level strategist who saves the day (even though the movie makes it hard to tell if his plane was shot down or he was hit by shrapnel from his own bombing run in an unsanctioned operation over Laos in the weeks leading up to the Vietnam War and his fellow POWs came up with "his" escape plan well before he was captured), tame in an era when torture porn horror was gaining in popularity, and generally boring as fuck. Once Dengler is shot down, you're in for almost two hours of visually conservative torture, walking through the jungle, and talking. Lots and tons of talking. It's like if the planning montage from a heist movie was replaced by an hour of the Senate scenes from Phantom Menace. Sorry if I've been referencing heist movies too much lately....

But there are two things that make Rescue Dawn worth watching.

First is Herzog's documentarian eye for the mundane, horrific, and beautiful alike. Every establishing shot, dialogue scene, and act of brutality (though the latter is usually edited away from to keep a theatrical rating while giving the aftermath of the carnage more weight, and on the few occasions that the surrounding material doesn't feel like a Terrence Malick snuff film, the cutaways actually work) is like reality made art, then made reality again, with the presence of known actors being the only real immersion break. I mean, one minute you're watching a professional Vietnam War documentary, and the next you're watching Batman, Charles Manson, and the dad from Wimpy Kid fight over who gets to eat a bowl of maggot-infested rice like it's Celebrity Survivor: Vietnam.

Which brings me to the other reason to watch Rescue Dawn: it has Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, and Jeremy Davies in it. 

Despite being an inaccurate portrayal (no German accent, the heroic focus on the character), this may be in Christian Bale's top three performances ever (The Machinist and American Psycho being the others; Bale is scary-good at character studies with emotional damage). I also found it interesting that Herzog shot the film in reverse order to accommodate Bale's weight gain while keeping the continuity of Dengler's weight loss. Especially since Bale infamously lost and gained large amounts of weight and muscle for The Machinist and Batman Begins in the two years prior to this. And that zoom on his tragedy-maddened stare as he peeks through the bushes in one scene is just haunting; a perfect combined effort by actor and director....

Jeremy Davies has a certain, unique style of line delivery that lands him in character-actor territory (specifically his role as Charles Manson in Helter Skelter from 2004, though he can't help himself in even later, better-known roles like Lost and Justified). Davies is a joy akin to the likes of Christopher Walken, such that I will watch anything with his name on it. But from his inimitable speech pattern to his appearance, it's clear here that he wanted people to remember him as the guy who played Charles Manson in that TV movie two years back. His character, Eugene "from Eugene" DeBruin, is a selfish, combative jerk who just gets abandoned to his own devices halfway through (and according to historical record, he was pronounced MIA and declared unofficially dead). I hate him. No offense to the real guy, but the character sucks. Then there's Steve Zahn as Duane Martin. He's winning by a hair as the best character in the movie because even though he's primarily known for comedic roles, Steve Zahn has the perfect face for drama, like an anti-Jim Carrey. When he goes off the deep end and the makeup team gets him looking all gaunt and ashy, Zahn delivers some of the most chilling dialogue in the movie, juxtaposed with expressions that I can only describe as "Bugs Bunny when he knows he's doomed," but on Steve Zahn's live-action, human face, and as wrong of a combination as that sounds, I love how perfectly, darkly absurd it is. Plus, in another wonderful convergence of actor and director (joined this time by the effects team), the brief shot of a beheaded Duane Martin made me run the movie back to find out if I saw what I thought I saw. And I did. And it was both shocking and shockingly good. Sorry I spoiled it.

Speaking of spoilers, Dengler's plane crashes in Laos, he's captured, tortured, asked to denounce America by a local political figure (speaking of Lost, Dr. Marvin Candle, François Chau, plays the Province Governor here), and imprisoned in a POW camp even though there isn't really a W happening yet, where he meets five (six in reality, but five - plus Dengler - was an easier number of characters to write for) others, including Duane and Eugene. They plan to ambush their captors at mealtime on July 4th (making this the third German-directed Independence Day movie I have reviewed this month, and I swear I didn't plan it this way), but with natural resources literally going up in smoke, our heroes are forced to accelerate their timetable and escape early. Contrary to the real Eugene's character, the portrayal here, as I said above, is a selfish prick who almost botches their escape for personal gain and is never seen again. After Dengler and Martin wander through the Laotian jungle for several days, Dengler (as well as a Thai prisoner who was later rescued offscreen because this is the Dieter Dengler movie) somehow gets rescued by a passing helicopter despite being a man in a green jumpsuit waving a big leaf in the jungle, with this happy ending brought to you by Butterfinger.

But wait; there's still twenty Viet-damned minutes left! In reality, after spending several weeks in an army hospital, Dengler becomes a point of contention between the Air Force and a Navy SEAL team, who get in a fight over who will debrief him, which the SEALS win because only Marines are more badass.

On the other hand, the movie ends with a federal crime (besides all of the government-sanctioned international federal crimes that allegedly comprised the Vietnam War). Instead of the Navy and Air Force fighting over him, movie Dengler is just debriefed by two chuckleheads from the CIA, who are easily fooled by four of his Navy buddies (including the voice of Cotton Hill himself, Toby Huss). They sneak him out in a food cart and copter him back to his ship, where the crew huzzahs him in the air like he scored the winning goal in Act III of a sportsball movie.

As the credits roll, we are reminded that those who can't do, teach, and those who can't teach, teach gym class, as Dengler would retire to become a flight instructor and survive four more plane crashes.

It was at this moment in the review when I checked Wikipedia to see if it was okay to make an "on his fifth flight, Dengler died when his plane crashed into a school gymnasium" joke...and found out that he had ALS and unshakable PTSD from his time in Laos, and that he shot himself in February 2001 after his ALS diagnosis. Also, I accidentally typed that he shit himself, but autocorrect fixed it for me. Now I feel like the biggest piece of shot on Earth....

Divorced from its historical inaccuracies, Rescue Dawn is an okay movie. It's filmed beautifully, acted brilliantly, and works as a Vietnam-set heist/prison break movie, but suffers from a lack of authentically brutal violence, torturous Act II pacing, and a bullshit happy ending. And knowing the reality behind it makes some of these flaws glaringly worse. Still, I see what made it my "war movie for people who don't like war movies," and those aspects still hold up.

C-

Hold up, wait a minute, and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your "I like this genre now!" movie at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't end up in a war camp because I can't afford sunscreen and my tan is too dark, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Also, not kidding about that tan. I'm the second from the left on the top row.

Ticketmaster,

Tanned.