A Herzog film is an amazing experience. They transcend time, space and offer surreal depictions of the natural habitat. The Herzog hero struggles with such variations in his environment and the results are often cruel and destructive.
This feels like Herzog's first film in a long time, going back to his roots in 'Aguirre' and 'Fitzcarraldo'. The classic Herzog style is still there: the rich expensive breathing jungle, the sparse dialogue, the unique direction style, and the amazing performances.
The film cuts straight to the action landing our hero in the fierce Laos jungle, in the stifling sticky heat and in all manner of feral wildlife, including the natives. He is tortured and held captive in a prisoner's camp. All the while Herzog's restraint and almost documentary style of film-making keeps the characters the primary focus of the story. More importantly the dreamlike atmosphere allows the jungle to take the spotlight in creating a cruel and unrelenting living, breathing setting.
Once in the prisoner's camp, the prisoners attempt to survive day by day and we manage to get inside each of their heads. The atmosphere in the camp is suitably perilous and acerbic, but always frighteningly lucid and deadly. My experience in the cinema was unnerving shocking and perhaps we really get a sensation of what it is to lose your basic human rights, your identity, and your mind.
The portrayal of the characters were frighteningly genuine, to the point that I believed that Bale as Dengler and his mate Duane (Zahn) were locked in there going insane everyday. Jeremy Davies as Gene was also sincerely creepy as a man completely out of touch with the real world. Each performance was absolutely stunning and entirely terrifying in their authenticity.
There are some many moments of humour in the camp, many juxtaposed with the seriousness of their situation. I felt I was living and breathing every day in that camp, a compliment to Herzog's often economic and intense direction to tell the story as is, through the characters and landscape.
What Rescue Dawn demonstrates transcends war; the tenacity of the human spirit to cope in their changing surroundings, whether they are prisoners of a faction (Rescue Dawn), prisoners to their mind (Kaspar Hauser) or to the landscape (Aguirre). Herzog's heroes survive where those around him perish, when the landscape destroys all other inhabitants and threatens the life of the hero himself. In Rescue Dawn, the country at war destroys all else around it, the prisoners of war, economic destruction, and obliteration of the land. His tough as nails characters are flawed, are human but how they use the human spirit allows them to change, to cope and hopefully survive.
This feels like Herzog's first film in a long time, going back to his roots in 'Aguirre' and 'Fitzcarraldo'. The classic Herzog style is still there: the rich expensive breathing jungle, the sparse dialogue, the unique direction style, and the amazing performances.
The film cuts straight to the action landing our hero in the fierce Laos jungle, in the stifling sticky heat and in all manner of feral wildlife, including the natives. He is tortured and held captive in a prisoner's camp. All the while Herzog's restraint and almost documentary style of film-making keeps the characters the primary focus of the story. More importantly the dreamlike atmosphere allows the jungle to take the spotlight in creating a cruel and unrelenting living, breathing setting.
Once in the prisoner's camp, the prisoners attempt to survive day by day and we manage to get inside each of their heads. The atmosphere in the camp is suitably perilous and acerbic, but always frighteningly lucid and deadly. My experience in the cinema was unnerving shocking and perhaps we really get a sensation of what it is to lose your basic human rights, your identity, and your mind.
The portrayal of the characters were frighteningly genuine, to the point that I believed that Bale as Dengler and his mate Duane (Zahn) were locked in there going insane everyday. Jeremy Davies as Gene was also sincerely creepy as a man completely out of touch with the real world. Each performance was absolutely stunning and entirely terrifying in their authenticity.
There are some many moments of humour in the camp, many juxtaposed with the seriousness of their situation. I felt I was living and breathing every day in that camp, a compliment to Herzog's often economic and intense direction to tell the story as is, through the characters and landscape.
What Rescue Dawn demonstrates transcends war; the tenacity of the human spirit to cope in their changing surroundings, whether they are prisoners of a faction (Rescue Dawn), prisoners to their mind (Kaspar Hauser) or to the landscape (Aguirre). Herzog's heroes survive where those around him perish, when the landscape destroys all other inhabitants and threatens the life of the hero himself. In Rescue Dawn, the country at war destroys all else around it, the prisoners of war, economic destruction, and obliteration of the land. His tough as nails characters are flawed, are human but how they use the human spirit allows them to change, to cope and hopefully survive.