Movie Review: Rescue Me From This Dawn Movie

Rating: 2 cigars (bad storytelling, bad moviemaking)

Sorry to burst your bubble, all you pro-military, pro-war hawks out there but if you are looking for a good story well told, Rescue Dawn will disappoint (and this coming from a pro-military, pro-war hawk).  What should have been a heartwarming movie of a courage and hope was tortured, choked and made to eat swamp larvae by a writer/director named Werner Herzog.

Dieter Dengler is an A-1 Skyraider pilot shot down over Laos during the Vietnam war and imprisoned in a POW camp. He stages an escape with the help of the other POWs before eventually being rescued but the story is told in such an amateurish and boring way you'd swear you were watching two hours of Tom Hanks talking to himself in Cast Away.

This film is based on a true story which I have not read but I cannot believe it is as unrealistic as Herzog describes. For one thing, Dengler is not hacked into pieces by the villagers that first capture him as what would've happened in real life. In SEA, you prayed that the VC picked you up first because they kept pilots alive for their propaganda value (the grunts on the ground weren't so lucky). Also, the amount of torture the Pathet Lao dishes up isn't very imaginative; a 100-yard drag by a 100-year-old ox and a dunking in a six-foot deep well is sure to give John McCain a chuckle or two.

Add to the plot's unbelievability a dreadful cast (Christian Bale is OK to midland), spotty distribution (was not showing in Plymouth), music that sounded like creaking chairs, cinematography that came straight from a cellphone and editing transitions created in Powerpoint and you have a undercapitalized YouTube movie (if that's possible).

You want to see a good Vietnam film see Apocalypse Now. You want realistic POW movie, see Bridge Over the River Kwai or To End All Wars. Courageous Dieter Dengler was able to overcome the odds in the jungles of Laos. Don't wreck his happy ending by watching this movie and seeing how he met his demise at the hand of a ruthless and sadistic film director waiting for him back at home.

UPDATE: Gateway Pundit weighs in on the message not the medium. Try this video: if the president gives his State of the Union wearing a beer-stained tanktop, has missing teeth and is holding a jar of urine, would you take his message seriously?

Comments

[mberg]

Another good POW movie - "Hanoi Hilton". They changed the names, but they got the story right - and Hollywood did its best to gundeck it.