A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

Even though it’s set in space, Sunshine is the quintessential man-versus-nature story; the sun is fading out, and if humanity doesn’t restore it to its former brilliance, every living thing on Earth will freeze to death. Unfortunately, the filmmakers didn’t seem to realize this, because they added a superfluous (and very poorly executed) psycho killer storyline to the second half of the movie. Even more absurdly, the psycho killer is the captain of the first mission to restore the sun. He went nuts and killed his entire crew, and now he’s determined the stop the second mission too. Why? Heck if I know. There’s some confusing and badly-written dialogue in which he says he’s been talking to God, and I guess the idea is that he thinks God told him to make sure the human race finishes dying, but his reasoning (if you can call it that) is never adequately explained.

While I watched the once-promising story fall apart, I got to wondering. Was the first mission’s captain always a nutjob, and did he sign up for the mission (and somehow slip through what must have been endless rounds of psych evaluation) specifically to sabotage it? Or did something about the long journey through space drive him mad? I guess the former scenario is kind of interesting in an abstract, intellectual sense, but it has little direct relevance to the second mission, and the second mission is what Sunshine is about. The latter possibility, though, is never explored, and while it could have added some tension by making us wonder who else might go crazy, it really wouldn’t work that well, because people have had plenty of experience with long, lonely missions — on submarines, in Antarctica, and so on.

I can just imagine the story meetings that led to the addition of the nutjob captain; somebody must have been afraid that the story didn’t have enough conflict to fuel a whole movie. After all, if the stakes are “drop a bomb into the sun and save humanity… or don’t”, well, what sane person is going to choose “don’t”? There doesn’t seem to be enough conflict inherent in the choice unless you do add a psycho killer. But that argument misses the whole point of man-vs-nature conflicts; the question isn’t so much whether the characters should do whatever they’re trying to do, it’s whether they can. Flying right up to the sun and surviving long enough to drop a bomb on precisely the right spot is the mother of all impossible tasks, so there’s plenty of conflict inherent in the story — between the crew and the sun, between the ship and the sun, between the crew and the ship, and between different crew members who disagree about how to successfully execute the mission. But here’s an idea: if the filmmakers really wanted an extra layer of conflict, why not have the first mission discover that there’s intelligent life in the sun (of a very different sort than we’re familiar with, of course) and that setting off the bomb will save the inhabitants of the Earth.. and exterminate the denizens of the sun? That would be a heck of a moral dilemma, and it would create a ton of conflict — more than enough for three whole acts.

A German who was a child during WWII and witnessed American bombing raids on his own country at very close range immigrates to the United States, signs up to be a Navy pilot and gets shot down while flying a top-secret bombing run over Laos during the Vietnam War. He’s captured by the Viet Kong and endures all manner of torture and privation at their hands, but he organizes an escape with his fellow prisoners of war and, with great difficulty, makes his way through the deadly jungle until finally he’s rescued, whereupon he immediately returns to active duty as a pilot.

Sounds tremendously interesting and exciting, right? Sadly, it’s not, or at least it’s not nearly as interesting and exciting as it should have been.

I’m writing, of course, about Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn, a dramatic retelling of the story of Dieter Dengler, which Herzog first told in his excellent documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Herzog is one of my absolute favorite writer-directors, responsible for masterpieces like Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man, and Rescue Dawn would seem to play to his strengths. The cruelty and power of nature is a recurring theme in his work, showing up in every single one of his films I’ve mentioned and many more, and so is man’s inhumanity to man, which is also prominently on display here. But Rescue Dawn is missing something. Of course we care for Dengler in the generic sense we’d care for anyone going through what we see him experience, and Herzog unsurprisingly does a terrific job of capturing those experiences on film. The problem is that Dengler starts off as a cipher and remains one through the bitter end. What motivates him? Who is he really? Why did he join the very military that obliterated his own home town, why did he bomb other people as he himself had been bombed, and why did he return to active duty after being shot down and experiencing firsthand the fear and hatred consuming his targets because of those bombings? The answers to those questions would surely be immensely compelling — the stuff of great drama — but they’re barely even hinted at, and so Dengler remains abstract, more like someone you’d hear about on the news than an individual you know personally and care about because of that relationship.

What’s needed is a character arc for Dengler, some kind of inner journey that gives form and meaning to his outer journey and provides a point, a reason to care about it all. The tragedy is that such an arc is alluded to in passing by the title card that ends the movie, informing us that Dengler left the military shortly after resuming active duty and took up a career as a test pilot. Perhaps he did this just because the fear of being shot down again was too great to overcome, but maybe he made that choice because it allowed him to satisfy his need to fly without requiring him to continue killing and maiming a bunch of hapless subsistence farmers.

The latter scenario is really the only sound option, because it’s already right there in the story’s DNA. As a child, obviously, Dengler saw the excitement and glamour of being a fighter pilot without gaining an adult’s understanding of the true consequences of war, and so when he grew up, he joined the Navy, eager to partake of that excitement and glamour and still not truly aware of the dark side of the job. But his experiences after being shot down had to have changed all that. You simply can’t get bombed, tortured, imprisoned, attacked by villagers who are terrified of Americans even when they’re practically just American corpses, and mistakenly shot at by your own people, without changing. And just as importantly, it’s human nature to prefer stories in which the protagonist changes and learns a lesson, because if he doesn’t, everything that just happened to him could happen all over again, and in that case there’s no point in wasting time on the story in the first place!

If Rescue Dawn had instead been a voyage of discovery, and if we’d seen Dieter Dengler coming to grips with what he’d learned during his ordeal and deciding he couldn’t remain in the military (particularly if we didn’t immediately learn of his subsequent career as a test pilot and so only saw him giving up flying, the most important thing in his whole life) it would have delivered a tremendously powerful emotional payload and it surely would have connected with a significantly larger audience than it has. Though Herzog certainly doesn’t have an unblemished track record, I can only wonder whether he feared the current political climate too much to risk questioning even decades-old US military policy… or whether he was unable to raise financing for a version of the film that would have asked those questions. As it stands, while Rescue Dawn has many incidental pleasures and secondary strengths, it’s ultimately a failure.