By Rob. Walton

German director Werner Herzog has a proven track record in stories of obsession, from Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982) to his award-winning 2005 documentary Grizzly Man. Now he's back in the jungle with a distinctively apolitical Vietnam War-era story about the only American POW to ever escape from a prison camp in the Laotian jungle. On his very first mission, U.S. Navy fighter Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) has barely dropped his payload on a Laotian village when his plane is shot down. What follows is his flight, capture, torture, near starvation in a jungle prison camp and ultimate attempt to escape.

The tropical corral where Dieter is contained is little more than bamboo and rattan, but this is no Pier One. He and a half dozen skeletal prisoners -- including fellow Americans Duane (Steve Zahn) and Eugene (Jeremy Davies) -- are beaten, restrained and starved by their desperate and terrified guards. Dieter wants them to escape, but they convince him their chances of survival are better if they just stay put.

Rescue Dawn doesn't look like your typical big budget war movie. In fact, if they had been filmed in black and white, you would swear the early flight sequences were shot with rear-screen projection in the 1950s. But once in country (the movie was lensed in Thailand) the story benefits from some of the lushest, most treacherous jungle terrain we've seen on screen, making their hopeless situation quite tangible.

Rescue Dawn is ultimately an actor's movie. Bale, for one, makes for an enigmatic war hero. Dieter's unflinching, single-minded belief in his objectives -- he refuses to eject from his crashing plane or cave to his captors' simplest demands -- makes him at first seem the simpleton. But just maybe it's his mellow way -- the affable demeanor of a stoner who complains that his captors won't let him take a bathroom break while they're torturing him -- that paints him as an innocent and ultimately keeps him alive. Regardless, he's eventually the mastermind of their great escape, revealing what resources one can summon when pushed to the limit.

The real-life events of Rescue Dawn take place in 1966 before most Americans knew we were even engaged in a conflict in Southeast Asia. As a result, this is a different type of Vietnam-era movie where our soldiers aren't yet completely desensitized or demoralized by a sense of betrayal. It's a personal escape story about a principled average joe pushed to the limits.