jed-82 Review of Rescue Dawn

Rescue Dawn (2006)

made the mistake of seeing it digitally in a cinema

[3/10 · 2 December 2007]

I saw it in a cinema which was screening it digitally, was it just the projectionist or was the quality of the sound really bad? From the offset I struggled with this film, as the sound in some area's made it hard to comprehend, I even heard other people in the cinema asking the friends beside them (what did he say?) Aside from that I thought translation from script to screen was undeveloped, and really missed a lot of potentially strong moments, I thought the prison camp could have been way more developed. As much as he is a legend I think Werner Herzog really missed it here and in a lot of ways was quite lazy in his approach. Maybe this criticism is a bit off as, mentioned before I did see it digitally in a cinema, with the right sound mix all things above could have been a lot stronger with good sound. The ending was an absolute cop out and I couldn't stop myself from laughing (was it supposed to be funny?). why didn't he just stop the film on the pick up!!! The strong point were the performances they were great from all involved particularly from Steve Zahn who I have not seen have so much freedom with performance before, and of course Christian Bale (dam his good) and although I am engaged, I do have a man crush on him. I won't rate it because I am not sure what the quality should have been, and to be quite honest unless the quality was supposed to be much stronger I don't intend on revisiting the film.