Little Dieter Needs to Fly Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

Little Dieter Needs to Fly Blu-ray Movie Review

Reach for the sky.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 20, 2014

Note: This title is currently available as part of Herzog: The Collection.

Has there ever been a more fascinating figure in film than Werner Herzog? This much debated individual, one who elicits both hyperbolic accolades and equally exaggerated derision, has been a seeming force of nature in film for decades, helping to define the New German Cinema (a somewhat later analog to the French New Wave). Herzog’s filmography is rather breathtakingly diverse, traversing both traditional fiction, quasi-biographies, and a large number of documentaries. Through it all, Herzog himself has become the subject of considerable controversy, at times seeming to be as obsessively motivated as some of his film subjects. The auteur’s off kilter blend of nihilism and often black humor has given him and his films a decidedly unique place in contemporary media, to the point that a supposed note Herzog jotted off to his cleaning lady became an internet sensation (it’s actually a brilliantly written parody by Dale Shaw). Shout! Factory, a label which repeatedly stubbed its corporate toe on its last big deluxe boxed set built around the talents of one person (Bruce Lee: The Legacy Collection, the only time in my reviewing career I have had to start over from scratch due to a complete recall and reissue) may seem to be throwing caution to the wind by upping the ante with this release. Here there are no fewer than 16 films by Herzog, housed in a handsome hardback booklike case that also features a wealth of text and information about each of the films. Fifteen of the films are new to Blu-ray (Shout's horror imprint Scream Factory released Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre as a standalone a few months ago), and the offerings here cover both iconic films in Herzog's oeuvre as well as some oddities. The extremely handsome packaging offers a 7.5" x 7.5" x 1.5" hardback book exterior casing which houses heavy cardstock pocket holders that contain the discs. Also included are The Werner Herzog Condition by Stephen J. Smith, an appreciation of the director's work with essays about each of the films. The films get even more text in write-ups by Chris Wahl and Brad Prager. Each of the pocket holder pages details the film (or in some cases, films) on each disc, with audio options and special features listed.

Werner Herzog has blurred the lines between “fiction” films (whether based on real life people and incidents or not) and documentaries perhaps more than any other single filmmaker since the dawn of cinema, and his bifurcated approach is completely in evidence not just in Little Dieter Needs to Fly itself, but in the fact that Herzog actually revisited the same story years later in a “fiction” film entitled Rescue Dawn. That film never really created much interest when it was released theatrically, despite featuring a starring performance by Christian Bale and receiving generally positive, respectful reviews. Rescue Dawn is actually one of the least opaque of Herzog’s “fiction” films, so it’s perhaps ironic that it didn’t find an audience. Even the few who saw it at the time may not have been aware that Herzog had covered the same material years earlier in a “nonfiction” arena, albeit one with “dramatizations” and “reenactments”. As stated above, no one has blurred the lines between documentaries and fiction films more than Werner Herzog.

“Little” Dieter is Dieter Dengler, now a middle aged man in 1997 when the documentary was made. Dieter had grown up in the shadow of one epochal battle, World War II, and defined his manhood in another—Vietnam. Dengler fell in love with planes as a child, despite the fact that at least some of them were raining down terror on his homeland of Germany from the clear skies above. That very bombing served as a kind of unexpected inspiration for Dieter, who was so impressed by the spectacle that he decided he wanted to be a pilot. After emigrating to the United States as a teen, Dieter had his dream come true courtesy of the Air Force.

Unfortunately, those dreams were soon grounded when Dieter became a Prisoner of War after having been shot down. He endured torture and indignities until he managed to escape in a foolhardy gambit that actually paid off. Little Dieter Needs to Fly recounts this entire history with Dieter offering first person accounts and, in one of the film’s perhaps questionable gambits, “recreations” (some involving Dieter himself) when he returned to Laos decades later as a middle aged man.

It's obvious that Herzog considered Dengler a comrade in arms. Both men shared a German youth and large swaths of experience in the United States. There's just a bit of hero worship on display in this documentary, something that may surprise followers of Herzog who might insist the director doesn't exactly see the honorable aspects of men, or at least Man. But that gives Little Dieter Needs to Fly a refreshing air of triumph (though the film ends with a brief coda detailing Dengler's death).

Little Dieter Needs to Fly Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Little Dieter Needs to Fly is presented on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. The "contemporary" interview sequences look decently sharp here, with a natural grain field and reasonably saturated colors. Once the film treks to the jungles of Laos, though, things are considerably softer and less well defined. The film is full of a lot of archival footage which varies greatly in quality. Some of the older video material suffers from anomalies like ghosting, and is in pretty ragged condition. Though not overly distracting, compression artifacts are on display from time to time.

Little Dieter Needs to Fly Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Little Dieter Needs to Fly's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track isn't overly ambitious, delivering a mix of narration (by Herzog) and on screen interviews and reenactments, all of which sound clear and clean and offer no issues of any kind whatsoever. Fidelity is excellent in this small scale track.

Little Dieter Needs to Fly Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

There are no supplements associated with this film, which shares a disc with Lessons of Darkness.

Little Dieter Needs to Fly Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

While this is a relatively straightforward piece for Herzog, the director still offers stylistic gambits like the reenactments and occasional thwacks at history (both American and German) as the film goes on. But as a portrait of one courageous man, Little Dieter Needs to Fly is unusually compelling. This presentation offers very good to excellent technical merits, and Little Dieter Needs to Fly comes Recommended.