Review of Little Dieter Needs to Fly

I love Herzog the Documentarian the most but wrapping his considerable doc-chops around this particular subject was a choice. We meet the bizarre and fascinating Dieter Dengler and he explains his escape from imprisonment and torture during the Vietnam war. I'd seen both this and Rescue Dawn before so his ordeal and the unforgettable way in which he unflinchingly relives it weren't new to me, but what was was the idea that he wasn't being super truthful about everything in his life. It was an angle I'd never considered but when I twigged early on that in almost every anecdote Dengler quantified random things as "two and a half" I became addicted to darkly interpreting his harrowing story from the angle of fraud. Specificity is such a tell, and I kept distractedly wishing the film had gone there, or even mused on it.