the audience applauded

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

The first must-see film of the year.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

While Herzog provides his usual share of directorial novelties (including a "re-enactment" of Dieter's trek through the Laotian jungle with his captors--but not carried to the extent of re- enacting the tortures he went through), it's hard to see why this miraculous death-avoiding trek of Dieter's is any more worthy of a documentary than, say, a survivor's story of a Wehrmacht soldier walking his way back to Germany from the Russian front. In both instances, it's a tale of an individual surviving death at every turn--and not a tale of the slaughterhouse that dealt death to millions of people over the course of a war. And while a Wehrmacht soldier's tale of survival might well include war crimes committed against civilians, Dieter's tale can hardly avoid that part of the tale--with the difference that the crimes committed by the soldiers of the Wehrmacht were never reported for the most part, whereas we have vivid technicolor imagery (incorporated into Herzog's film as well) of the horrors inflicted on the people of Vietnam. Herzog's usage of historical footage of US bombing runs may indeed convey a deeply unsettling sensation of the contrast between the "glorious" technicolor pyrotechnics and the imaged horror felt by the people living the experience on the ground--and, I suppose, that's to Herzog's credit. But, in the end, this tale of an American pilot's escape from a POW camp--a tale that so defies credibility that it must be true--ends up endowing the protagonist with a hero's status. It's true enough that Dieter refuses the label "hero" (because "only the dead can be heroes"), but he also evidences not one iota of remorse for his participation in the war. And this is the problem: A hero must be someone who embodies and realizes in his deeds the noblest virtues and values of our culture. Being a willing combatant in a war initiated by the US and that led to the deaths of between a million and a half and 4 million people for no good reason is not the stuff of heroes.

Little Dieter Needs to Fly ranks among the very best of Herzog's work, and though it spawned the large scale production of 'Rescue Dawn', the original stands on its own as a masterpiece of documentary filmmaking. A highly engrossing (and frankly, incredible) story, told from the eyes of Dieter Dengler, a man who enlisted in the army during the Vietnam war so he could fulfill his childhood fantasy of flying a plane. I won't get into the details of his story, but I will say that it is one of the single most gripping and moving accounts of survival I have ever heard, and it is made all the more powerful by Dieter's retelling and countenance. His attitude towards life is unfazed; he amazingly not only survived, but kept his wits about him, a childlike innocence and curiosity about the world still intact.This is one of the greatest documentaries ever made.

This is an award-winning documentary that deserves its honors.Dieter Dengler was a boy in Germany when he watched Allied planes shoot up his little village. A fighter zipped past his window, missing it by only a few feet, and the enemy pilot in the open cockpit looked directly over his shoulder at little Dieter, to whom the face was alien, covered with a tight leather helmet and goggles. At that moment, Dieter tells us, he knew he needed to fly.Dieter is now a balding, middle-aged man, apparently living alone in a comfortable house on Mount Tamalpais, just north of San Francisco. He speaks rather quickly and with animation, although with little emotion. As he describes his experiences as a Naval aviator in Vietnam, his capture and imprisonment, and the horrors of his escape, his presentation is that of a tool and die maker explaining the wonderful intricacies of his new horizontal milling machine to an interested visitor.He emigrated to the United States as a teen, worked his way through college, and the Navy taught him to fly Douglas Skyraiders on bombing missions over North Vietnam and Laos. It was in Laos that he was shot down and kept prisoner. After shooting his way out, he made his way barefoot through the jungle, eating rats and so forth, across almost the entirety of Laos until he was down to about 85 pounds and was reduced from walking to crawling, before being accidentally spotted by the Air Force and rescued. No need to go on about the torture, starvation, and leeches.There are a few unusual things about this film. We've seen others like it, both real and fictional, but none, I think, that are quite so matter of fact about such extraordinary human experiences. Not once does Dieter break down or tear up, not even when describing how his escapee companion -- two men who slept under a blanket of mud at night with their arms around each other to keep warm -- has his head chopped off by a Laotian with a bush knife.Nor does Dieter attribute his nearly miraculous survival to anything that might come readily to another kind of mind. He doesn't brag about his own ability to endure, not even subtly. As far as we can tell, he has no religion and never prayed for strength. He dreamed often -- of his village in Germany, of food, of comfortable beds -- but he was never activated by notions of returning to his loved ones or his home.In newsreel footage we see Dieter as a handsome, smiling, affable young Lieutenant (jg) who seems to have an interesting story to tell reporters and debriefers. When the film producers take him back to Southeast Asia, he demonstrates the making of fire from nothing more than the hollow stalk of an old bamboo.It's the closest that the director, Werner Herzog, has come to making a movie that depends on the viewer's emotions for much of its impact. He himself does the occasional narration, and he speaks perfect English with sonorous British grace notes. Listening to him speak, for some reason, reminded me of someone playing a slow, sweet, centuries-old tune on an instrument like a French horn. Herzog isn't much of a moralist. The politics of the Vietnam war play no part in the movie. He seems drawn, though, to stories of people with exceptional, sometimes bizarre visions that lead to quests ending in failure. Here, for once, the quest succeeds.The final shot of the movie shows Dieter walking happily through what he calls "a pilot's dream," a couple of mothballed jet fighters on some isolated desert field. The caption reads: "And Dieter Got What He Wanted, A Planet Covered With Airplanes." In a helicopter shot, the camera rises slowly from the ground and Dieter becomes a tiny figure lost among hundreds or maybe thousands of aircraft stored neatly, wing tip to wing tip, covering several square miles of ground.

Little Dieter Needs To Fly is another in the remarkable body of Werner Herzog's filmic work that is without peer. Having recently rewatched it on DVD, nearly a decade after its initial US release in 1997, it has lost none of its power, and one can see its influence on documentaries as diverse as Herzog's own recent Grizzly Man and Errol Morris's Academy Award winning The Fog Of War. Like the former, it details, in its far too brief 74 minutes, the life of an interesting American. Like the latter it gives a peek at a side of war that few see. Yes, we see the violence and the heroism, but as The Fog Of War brought us into the mind of one of last century's foremost warmongers, this film allows us a peek at the life of a grunt who is captured by the enemy, tortured, and ultimately triumphs. Except, in no way, shape, nor form, is the film as simplistic nor upbeat as my brief description of it. Nor is Little Dieter Needs To Fly's titular subject, Dieter Dengler, and immigrant German who survived the depredations of the Nazis (we find out, as example, that in his hometown, Wildburg, in the Black Forest, his grandfather was the only man not to vote for Hitler, and suffered brutally for that stand) post-World War Two Germany, and his own imprisonment at the hands of the Vietcong, when his Air Force jet was shot down over Laos on February 1st, 1966…. While the title of the film, and the idea of Dengler's passion for becoming a pilot, stirred by the impression Allied fighter planes made on him when they razed his town, as a child, make one believe that Dengler is the central subject of the film, this is not true. The subject is Dengler's survival, or, more precisely, his human will, all human will. The details of Dengler's romantic life are too Hollywood and staid an aspect to interest Herzog. Nor is the fact that he won a Purple Heart, Medal of Honor, the D.F.C., and the Navy Cross. That thing which pushed Dengler to survive so much, and remain such a relatively upbeat man (although there are glimpses of darker sides), is what is at the center of this film, and all of Herzog's canon. Dieter Dengler's 'distant barbaric dream' of his past is fully ripened Herzog Country, and the use of a Madagascan chant, Oay Lahy E, during many jungle scenes, among other excellent touches in the score, show Herzog is, perhaps along with only Martin Scorsese, the best manipulator of image and music in film. Long may he merge!