Given the origins and continuance of Werner Herzog's still-growing oeuvre, it's safe to say that Rescue Dawn, his newest film, is not up to par with his other works. Recreating the magnificent Little Dieter Needs to Fly into a motion picture, Herzog now eschews a Hollywood-esque narrative that results in exactly something that one didn't expect: another conventional POW escape film. Despite the ethereally realized evocation of time and place, Rescue Dawn is a fine-grained disappointment, not because of the fact that the film fundamentally does not work, but because the result could have added to so much more; the fact is, the film simply seems robbed of Herzog.
Rescue Dawn, unlike most of his films—including the masterful The White Diamond—only encapsulates two of the directors current thematic obsessions: obsessed heroes and nature. Herzog sees Dieter Dengler (a fantastic—like usual—Christian Bale) as a god, which gives him space to aestheticize the former with the latter. While on his first bombing mission over pre-Vietnam War Laos in 1966, Dengler is hit by incoming enemy fire, subsequently crashing on Laotian territory. After being captured by local Laotian soldiers, Dengler—who had just wittingly refused to sign a paper claiming the U.S.'s harms—is put into a POV camp with fellow inmates (among them played by Zahn and Davies). After careful planning and timing, the inmates escape. Up to this point, Rescue Dawn plays as an efficient, barely Herzog recognizable action film. Herzog's camera-work still proves the keen adeptness of the director's skill, but such an aspect is even, as odd as it may seem, quite rare. His script, as usual, is pretty much impeccable, proficiently capturing Dengler's relentless drive to escape.
The thick, mountainous cinematography evokes a fantastically real atmosphere of escape (yet I do not know how the hell Scott Foundas of LA WEEKLY can compare this to Robert Bresson; the latter was a master at escape, turning everything into art), but as surprising as it may seem, Rescue Dawn, through out, lacks that kind of direction-less trance that was conjured in his masterpiece Aguirre: The Wrath of God and subsequent Fitzcarraldo. More than anything, Rescue Dawn, unlike all of his previous films, lacks that and one more thing: the metamorphosis into an eloquent spiritual, transcendental journey. Powerful scenes in the film prove quickly forgettable—much of it, thanks to Klaus Badelt's heinously Hollywood-esque score—and the ending is the true meaning of a disappointment: essentially, it reeks of furthermore Hollywood sentimentality—to the degree that one can not (or dares not) consider it as a Herzog film anymore. It's crystal-clear that the great director could have done so much more with the ending, and it is really quite pernicious, because such a realization of Rescue Dawn's sentimentally familiar end fails to perpetuate it as a heavenly composite of the film's collective whole, something that leaves the viewer visually—and deceptively—circumvented. The acting pas de deux on display in the film clearly redeems the film from any type of inscrutable nightmare, and as the abhorrent score plays during the finale, one can't help but to wonder why Herzog's hallucinatory spell was broken. The act of self-reflexivity has been stripped away, and all is left is pure Herzogian convention. For all it's flaws, At least one can thank MGM that it's a Herzog film.
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