New Zealand International Film Festival - Rescue Dawn (2006)

The lights came up, credits continued to roll, I sat till the very end. The only person in front of me shook his head and chuckled knowingly at the final title to appear: "Top Gun Productions 2006" Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn had just finished, Christian Bale's character escaping his vietcong prison and surviving the jungle. I knew I should also find it funny, and kinda did, but not as much as the other guy.

As I collected my coat I realised no one had left the theatre yet. It must be a film festival audience.

It is New Zealand's 36th International Film Festival, and being a writer I was free to attend most of the day.

It was my first time in Wellington's Embassy Theatre and the main cinema is a majestic three-tier affair reminiscent of Glasgow Film Theatre's Cinema One.I'd never actually seen a Herzog film at the cinema. And he has a taste for man vs wilderness in epic tales of struggle. Stuff you should really watch on the big screen.

So I was quietly enthused as the lights went down (although slightly annoyed to see the margins of the frame over the curtains, something I have become heightened to since working as a projectionist). The story is of Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale), a German-American fighter pilot who was shot down over Laos in 1965. Captured and viciously tortured by the Viet Cong, Dengler seized an opportunity to escape, taking two American POWs with him.

Herzog seems to have found in Bale his new Klaus Kinski - an actor willing/capable of undergoing extreme duress and characterization to fulfill a role - although Jeremy Davies seemed to be outdoing him in the prison camp with a caved in malnutrition-ravaged skeletal frame that Bale wasn't even close to in The Machinist.

Davies was also a delight with his twisted finger pointing paranoid rants like Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys. There was a good vein of humour throughout, with the pilots watching a dated jungle survival video and making jokes before going on their fateful mission. I will be trawling my way through the Herzog films I have missed so far after seeing this.