Little Dieter Needs to Fly

The movie is mainly a monologue, with glimpses of Dieter's life nowadays, but built in its central section around the somewhat bizarre device of having him return to the jungle with a band of Vietnamese who partly reenact his experiences - he demonstrates torture techniques, the march through the jungle etc. Herzog is too much a filmmaker to be satisfied with mere memories it seems - he must also see: although with full knowledge that this form of retrospective seeing will be inescapably somewhat bizarre. Dieter's past traumas and current stability (although he's still preoccupied by the idea of closed doors and is still hoarding vast unneeded emergency food supplies - the former seems a bit staged, but that's part of the intrigue) seem to chime with Herzog's own past glories and now relative reduced state, and the title with its obviously childish edge has an air of longing and acknowledgment of past fantasies and their fatal possibilities. But despite the true pain of the monologue, Herzog doesn't dwell on adversity, but rather on the ultimate grandeur (for example, the final image of thousands of military planes parked in the desert) - in which context his movie seems to fall short of the true cosmic resonance of some of Errol Morris' work. But he coaxes Dieter's story expertly and has the classic strengths of a good story-teller, and the movie's quite fascinating even if it doesn't completely gel in all respects.