As with this space disaster movie, Howard adds suspense to a score we already know. In 2018, 12 teenagers and their soccer coach were rescued from a flooded cave in northern Thailand. Howard is not trying to add any Hollywood melodrama. The former Happy Days actor lets the facts speak. It’s the film’s strength but also its weakness.
In a live opening scene, we follow a children’s soccer team as they take a bike ride after training to the Tham Luang Caves.
Howard showed no interest in delving into their backgrounds or showing us how they were trapped so deeply in a cave system during a flash flood.
Instead, the film quickly turns to media hype and attempts to save them.
As villagers toil on the mountainside to divert water from the cave, Thai naval teams make a failed rescue attempt.
But resident British citizen Fern Unsworth (Louis Fitzgerald) is an experienced diver who calls two middle-aged amateur cave divers from Britain, John Volanthen (Colin Farrell) and Richard Stanton (Viggo Mortensen).
After several attempts, these “old men” (according to the seals) are the first to reach the boys after a grueling dive through narrow passages and past steep rocks.
But their parents’ celebrations worry Stanton. Getting the boys out alive would be an almost impossible feat.
He brings in another diver, Australian anesthetist Richard “Harry” Harris (Joel Edgerton), who is given the terrifying task of drugging each boy so that their unconscious bodies float through the narrow tunnels. It’s a brave and risky plan.
Howard’s movie dominates, but if you want to understand the pressures these divers endure, the documentary The Rescue is a tense and deeper film about the same story.
- Thirteen Lives, Cert 12A, in cinemas now, on Amazon Prime Video from August 5
[ad_2]
