Fuckin Herzog, man. He’s...He’s a crazy fucking Kraut, that one. His work with Klaus Kinski is obviously impressive. Between Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, that’s hard to be beat. But he found a new madman here for this one, in the form of Christian Bale. And this one is no different in the themes of dominating will to succeed, and madness. It seriously is batshit crazy what happened here, based on a true story.
1965, Viet Nam. Ever heard of the Gulf of Tonkin? Well, this kinda sets that shit up. A young U.S. Navy pilot, on his first mission. Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale), a German gone full American, a bit naive maybe but a genuinely good guy, just wanting to fly, ends up getting involved in this
This is a validation of the will of one man. Not only to fly, but live after basically worst case scenario. Scenarios, really. Extra kudos to Bale and his extreme method acting, he went to great physical lengths to become gaunt, but that’s not surprising after what he did in The Machinist from a couple years earlier but still, Holy Shit, yeah, seriously. That’s pretty extreme. Good roles by Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies here as well, even the secondary characters including a kinda midget dude nicknamed “Jumbo”. All stretched to their psychological and physical limits, prisoner and captor alike, but mostly the prisoner side of things, horrifically well done on all their parts. And this film is a testament to them and the lensed storytelling by Werner Herzog. I don’t think this film got much credit, but it’s a pretty good one for tension and drama.
A by-note on Herzog. He’s got two distinct modes, fictional and documentary, though the fictional tend to be very documentaryish in how he approaches them. Some are better than others, in both categories. He kinda told the story first with Little Dieter Needs to Fly in 1997 so this is the more fictional account of the happenings. And I don’t know if they are still doing “The most interesting man in the world” beer commercials, but I’m still pretty sure they were based on Werner Herzog....Fuckin Herzog, man.
