Werner Herzog’s first Hollywood feature takes him back to the lush jungle terrain and themes of earlier works such as Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo. Only now we have a director less anxious to show the world what a crazy artistic genius he is. Rescue Dawn is the work of a man who is tired of being a legend and wants to make a living. For a mainstream audience, it is Herzog’s most accessible, and enjoyable, film to date.

It’s a fictionalised version of his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. In that film, Dieter Dengler — a German-born US navy pilot — told the story of how he was shot down over Laos and captured, then escaped a prisoner-of-war camp and survived in the surrounding jungle for 23 days. Herzog has turned the facts of Dengler’s life back into a powerful drama. The opening suggests we are set for another Vietnam film, with its slow-motion footage of American bombers at work over what we must assume is Laos. But Rescue Dawn has little in common with the ’Nam genre. You won’t hear a single sound of the 1960s: no Jimi, no Jim. And, despite its outward resemblance to The Deer Hunter, this is really an old- fashioned prison/survival film, occupying a space somewhere between The Shawshank Redemption and Touching the Void.

Only one scene evokes The Deer Hunter. Remember when, during a game of Russian roulette, Robert De Niro puts a gun to his head and gives a crazy laugh before pulling the trigger? Here we see the starving Dengler give the same kind of laugh — and put a handful of maggots into his mouth. Dengler is not your typical testosterone-driven Top Gun tough guy. He’s a classic Herzogian hero: the innocent with a big dream, doing battle with nature and himself. He is the man who walks through hell with a big smile on his face. At times, his boyish, goofy grin is a form of resistance — or a sign of insanity. It’s this lunacy that keeps him alive.

Herzog has avoided all questions of morality and politics. We are told that Dengler never wanted to go to war, he just wanted to fulfil his boyhood dream of being a pilot. Well, I’m sure there were plenty of American airlines that would have hired him. The thought that maybe the ordinary people of Laos paid a deathly price for Dengler’s dream is never raised. But whatever qualms we may have are soon quashed when, having been shot down on his first mission, he is tortured by Pathet Lao soldiers on their way to a POW camp. There he finds two starving Americans, Duane (Steve Zahn) and Gene (Jeremy Davies), along with three southeast Asians. Dengler is warned by his fellow Americans that if he keeps his head down and his mouth shut, they’ll soon be released. But he is certain he will escape. No flimsy bamboo hut can hold him, he tells the others. “Don’t you get it? The jungle is the prison,” replies one.

What follows is a gripping study of quiet heroism. Dengler survives without surrendering his humanity. The challenge he and the other inmates face is internal; the enemy is their own despair, which leads to defeatism. Dengler keeps these men alive with nothing but the belief that escape is possible.

Unlike his other tales from the jungle, Herzog’s new film is free of epic grandness. There’s none of the folie de grandeur of Fitzcarraldo; in place of crazed romanticism, we get down-to-earth realism. Herzog makes you feel the inmates’ hunger, the sheer physical discomfort of sleeping shackled to men who have to urinate and defecate in their clothes. You smell the rot of humanity as much as the humidity of the jungle. There, Dengler and Duane cling to each other as they hack their way through the foliage and face floods, leeches, insects, starvation and hallucinations. Herzog’s best films have always operated under the belief that, as far as actors are concerned, it’s no pain, no gain. You can tell he has put his cast through its paces on this one. We watch the brilliant Bale actually bite into a snake and eat maggots. Much has been said of his loss of weight in this and other roles, but check out Jeremy Davies’s skeletal frame.

Rescue Dawn may lack the iconoclasm and experimentalism of the Herzog of old, but it has a dramatic richness that grabs your guts and gives them a good shake.

12A, 125 mins

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• DVD

• Oscars

• Bollywood

Editor's choice

• Gordon Brown’s secret to stayin’ alive
• What’s up with Woody?
• Can Cannes get serious?