Werner Herzog’s first Hollywood-funded feature is, for him, an unusually straightforward, plot-driven affair. A reworking of his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, it tells the true story of Dieter Dengler, a German-born American fighter pilot shot down over Laos during the Vietnam war: captured, tortured and imprisoned, Dengler escaped into the jungle and was eventually rescued. Here, Dengler is played by the consistently interesting Christian Bale, becoming a man who, driven by an overweening desire to fly, embraces the role of all-American hero with all the verve of a foreigner, in a portrait whose nuances might have been more apparent had Bale adopted the German accent Dengler retained throughout his life. Bale is supported by Steve Zahn, who is surprisingly convincing as Duane, a fellow escapee whose mental and physical collapse is faster and more brutal than Dengler’s own.

Rescue Dawn is an intense, involving movie: the camera clings to Dengler, forcing the viewer to experience with him the terror inspired by the unintelligible, unpredictable, psychotic natives; the wearing, edgy tedium of the POW camp; the smothering impenetrability of the forest; the squeezing out of all thoughts but staying alive. This imprisoning of the viewer will frustrate many Herzog fans, as the film never breaks away to “ecstatic truth”, to that revelation of the vast, brain-wiping bleakness of existence which characterises the director’s most powerful films. It is not only the claustrophobia of the cinematography that discourages this kind of epiphany: the landscape is, in typical Herzogian fashion, wired directly to the protagonist’s brain, but here it closes in around Dengler rather than opening out into the Alaskan emptiness of Grizzly Man or the Amazon of Aguirre; and Dengler isn’t a visionary megalomaniac of the type immortalised in the crazed raging of Kinski’s best creations – his unravelling is contained by a narrow, feral concentration on survival.

Also, troubled young production company Gibraltar Films seem to have tried to straitjacket Herzog into a conventional, low-budget, glossy action flick, while Herzog himself appears to have been distracted by his Boy’s Own approach to filmmaking – a need for practical challenges and physical hardship which here spills over from behind the camera and threatens to swamp the film. Clearly, departing from a directorial trademark is not necessarily a cause for criticism, but this film constantly feels to be straining for a release it is never allowed, despite Dengler’s own escape. Rescue Dawn, then, is good rather than great: it consumes you for a while as a film, but doesn’t stay with you – like some of Herzog’s best works – as existential truth.