Rescue Dawn (2006)

Rescue Dawn is director Werner Herzog's scripted dramatic rendering of events he had previously covered in his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. It is the story of Dieter Dengler, the German born U.S. pilot who was the first American to escape from a POW camp during the Vietnam War. His plane was shot down over Laos in February of 1966, he was captured, tortured, and placed in a POW camp along with two fellow Americans, three Thai's and one Chinese. The group staged a mass escape in the summer of 1966 but ultimately it was only Dieter who was able to make it out alive. Dengler had endured harsh conditions before growing up in Germany during and in the aftermath of the second World War, and his determination to survive served him well. After Vietnam Dieter worked as a test pilot and survived multiple other crashes before succumbing to Lou Gehrig's disease in 2001. Dieter is played affectively by Christian Bale in the film, though I wish he had at least tried for a German accent. Steve Zahn gives a better then expected performance as fellow POW Duane W. Martin. This is quite the story. ***1/2