RESCUE DAWN (2006)

Director: Werner Herzog

I really wanted to simply love this film. But after seeing it, I’m a bit disappointed. Sadly, because I had high expectations. I’ve been looking forward to see this film for several months now.

Christian Bale is a superior actor, and he does exactly what is asked of in this film. Most actors are good here, and I don’t really have any problems with anyones performance. Some scenes are tense, disturbing and genuinely scary.

However, we’ve seen this before, and we’ve seen it made several times much better. And from what I understand, Herzog has made a very inaccurate screenplay, which I see as a bit dishonest and almost evil. Why play out Eugene this way? Seems to me that the people who were there say that Gene was not like this at all. There were no real reason to change the facts.

One other thing that constantly bothered me was the bad camera work. The camera jumps, is unclear, has drops of water all over it, shakes and so on in amateurish ways. The person behind the camera must be a very inexperienced camera man, because this was bad.

Also, the editing is well below common standards. Some scenes are too long and could’ve used a trim. The film is over two hours, which is about 40 minutes too much. There isn’t simply that much material to cover here. Maybe if Herzog had added the seventh prisoner as it was in reality, we could’ve used a little bit longer time, but now, it’s waste of time.

We don’t get a clear introduction to the other prisoners, which I think is sad. It would’ve been much more interesting to actually see the group grow, and see the group efforts and also play out the hostility from the guards.

We get to know the guards by their alias names given to them by the prisoners, but we never understand WHY Little Hitler is called Little Hitler. For being a film where people are tortured in a jungle prison, there’s very little torture and very little prison.

The jungle is there, and that’s about the best in the whole film.

Herzog is a boring schmuck who obviously has no clue on how to direct a film so it becomes interesting, exciting and scary. At some scenes he gets lucky, but I doubt it’s because of skill…

Herzog made documentaries before, and rather controversial ones I’ve understood. I’ve never seen anything else from him, and quite frankly, after watching RESCUE DAWN, I’m not so interested in doing so either.

Seems to me that Herzog has his own idea on what “reality” is. It is also clear for me that he doesn’t understand the drama format, or what to do with it.

Overall RESCUE DAWN is not a bad film – it’s just ruined by a bad director and an idiot behind the camera. Everything in front of the camera is nice and professional.

With another director, a more truthful script and a better camera man, this could’ve been a classic!

Score: 6