Little Dieter Needs to Fly

1997

Biography / Documentary / Drama / War

2
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Certified Fresh 93% · 14 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 94% · 2.5K ratings
IMDb Rating 8.0/10 10 7250 7.3K

vietnam war vietnam vietcong prisoner of war u.s. navy post war germany

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Plot summary

Three decades after German-American pilot Dieter Dengler was shot down over Laos, he returns to the places where he was held prisoner during the early years of the Vietnam War. Accompanied by director Werner Herzog, Dengler describes in unusually candid detail his captivity, the friendships he made, and his daring escape. Not willing to stop there, Herzog even persuades his subject to re-enact certain tortures, with the help of some willing local villagers.

Director

Werner Herzog Photo
Werner Herzog

Top cast

Werner Herzog Photo
Werner Herzog as Self - Narrator
Dieter Dengler Photo
Dieter Dengler as Self
Eugene Deatrick Photo
Eugene Deatrick as Self
720p.WEB 1080p.WEB
707.3 MB
1280*720
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
1 hr 16 min
Seeds 9
1.28 GB
1920*1080
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
1 hr 16 min
Seeds 17

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by 42ndStreetMemories 9 / 10

A Complete Work

I had the opportunity to see this last evening at a local film festival. Herzog introduced the film and did an hour long Q&A afterward.This is a brilliantly done "documentary"; Herzog explained afterward that he does not consider his films to be true documentary since facts sometimes camouflage the truth. Instead he scripts some scenes and ad-libs some to introduce a new element that may have been missed if he followed the original story outline.Little Dieter, unlike Timothy Treadwell, is a real person that you fall in love with; you cheer for him, you feel the anguish that he feels. You admire the sense of humor and joy for life that he exhibited here 30 years after he was taken into captivity by the Viet Cong. You are disappointed to hear afterward that Dieter passed on not too long ago.As in most Herzog films, the imagery is breathtakingly beautiful with a wonderful choice of background music. Especially a scene of battle taken from archives of the Viet Nam war but fitting the story line of Dieter.The core of the film has Dieter return to the hellish jungle where he was a POW and he re-enacts his journey with some locals. Harrowing for us to watch, I can't imagine what he felt as he was bound again.One of the better films to depict and discuss the nightmare of the Viet Nam war. It should serve as a lesson to us all.
Reviewed by stephenksmith 8 / 10

a surreal documentary about a German American who needs food and flight

Werner Herzog again explores the psyche of a man. In "Little Dieter...", we meet an effervescent, brilliant man who survived the war in Bavaria seeing starvation and strange sights, moved to the U.S. and fulfilled his dream of being a flier. War, food, death, survival, hoarding, planes, heads coming off... how one American is born. Herzog again sees madness as plane of existence and the surreal blends with the poignant as Herzog himself narratives this psychic travelogue of a German becoming an American who flies prop planes in a late 20th century war where the culmination of technology, pilgrimage and eating out of garbage cans with spoons is melded with constant optimism into a man redefined into American. As always with Herzog we are faced with florid madness, brilliance and what is man in the face of his own excesses, societal and personal. We laugh and cringe and are amazed at this man. Where else for this man but America?
Reviewed by wandereramor 8 / 10

Werner Herzog needs to narrate my life

Little Dieter Needs to Fly tells the story of Dieter Dengler, an Air Force pilot who was shot down in Vietnam and miraculously survived in the jungle for quite some time. In other hands this narrative could become maudlin, melodramatic, and jingoistic, but fortunately we have Werner Herzog and his trademark thickly-accented narration to remind us that all in life is futile. We have the perverse, hopeless landscape of a film like Lessons of Darkness, but Dieter's story gives us at least a mild hope of escaping that world. At times the power of the story and Dengler's matter-of-fact recounting of it overpowers Herzog's heavy stylizing, and a times they work together. It's a quite interesting dynamic.Some of the filming choices don't quite work -- take, for instance, the decision to have Dengler re-enact some aspects of his captivity with confused-looking Vietnamese villagers -- whereas others are downright moving -- the Mongolian throat-music, or the final shot of the field full of airplanes, suggesting how the government weaponizes and exploits the childish desire to fly. There are also times where one could accuse the film of being a simple "inspiring" survival story, but I think for the most part it rises above that genre while simultaneously serving as the best example of it.
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