Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell, Joel Edgerton, Tom Bateman, Paul Gleeson, Teeradon Supapunpinyo
Distributor: Amazon Prime
Runtime: 147 mins. Reviewed in Sep 2022
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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In June 2018, when a young Thai football and their coach were trapped by flooding in a cave, the world joined in an extraordinary effort to find and, more extraordinarily, to rescue them.
For audiences who remember the events in Thailand in June-July 2018, when the football team of young boys and their coach became trapped in a cave, this is a strong dramatisation. Previous to the release of this film, there had been an Oscar-nominated documentary, The Rescue. While some viewers of each film want to promote one as better than the other, a more reasonable approach would be to accept each film on its merits – and, this may depend on the order in which the films are seen. This reviewer saw The Rescue first and appreciated the documentary tone, the reconstruction of the swimming and the rescue, the introduction to the actual characters and their comments. This provided a useful background to appreciating the characters, the situations and the difficulties as depicted in Thirteen Lives.
The screenplay is by British writer, William Nicholson, whose credits range from his C.S. Lewis drama Shadowlands (1993) to Gladiator (2000). The film was directed by Ron Howard, former child actor, director of a wide range of entertaining films, fiction and striking documentaries for more than 40 years. He tackled an extraordinarily challenging and dangerous situation, in space, with Apollo 13 (1995).
Any review must give credit to the technical side of this film. There is a reconstruction of the cave, the audience being well aware of rocks, stalactites, narrow tunnels to swim through with oxygen equipment. In fact, the production design enhances the realism of the story and the storytelling. It is one of those films where the audience feels that it is there, not just watching what is going on, but sharing the experience with the divers, close-ups of the tunnels, the claustrophobic effect, the dangers of flowing currents, the setting up of the rope guides to continue the search and then the rescue.
The filmmakers have opted for using Thai language with the Thai characters among themselves, meaning that an English-speaking audience can be satisfied when the characters speak English but also share the fact that this action takes place in a country with which they are not particularly familiar, where people use a different language, with a different customs (courtesy being important, and an emphasis on religious belief and practice, prayer, meditation, Buddhist monks, offerings).
The film also shows the local activity: the gathering of the parents and their anxiety and fears, the invasion of the media, the setting up of stalls for feeding all those involved. And there are the Thai Navy Seals, limited in their abilities, and a death. There is the governor and the decisions he must make, some hostility between him and the captain in charge.
Two divers are brought in from the United Kingdom, Rick Stanton and John Volanthen (and their characters are created well by Mortensen and Farrell). Despite some local wariness, they eventually find the boys, alive, surviving without food, in the dark, meditating and encouraging each other. The movie builds suspense, even though most audiences know the outcome.
While the boys are found, there is still the difficulty of getting them out, and a presumption that they would die. This is where Australian doctor Richard Harris (Edgerton) comes in, where he and an associate (who is not made a character in the film) worked out the medication and anaesthetics required to subdue the boys to enable them to hours of being rescued, unconscious.
Tribute is also made to the locals who used limited means, even splitting bamboo to make channels, to pump out the water and for it to go over local farms. A film which has received almost unanimous acclaim from critics and public alike.
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