Thirteen Lives

 

Joel Edgerton (center), Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen working to save “Thirteen Lives.”               Amazon Prime photo via IMDB

One summer day in 2018, twelve young Thai members of the Wild Boar soccer team ended practice before setting off on their bikes to explore the nearby Tham Luang Nang Non cave complex. An assistant coach accompanied the boys, ages 11 to 16. 

They were already underground in the sprawling maze of caverns and tunnels under the Thai-Myanmar border when the rain began. Monsoon season had arrived unseasonably early, adding to the boys' parents' terror when their sons didn't return later that afternoon.

The story that unfolded – first of the boys' disappearance; then of their discovery, all still alive but trapped as the water level in the cave kept rising; then of a rescue too outrageous to be believed – held the world spellbound for the next 18 days.

It was the kind of adventure you only see at the movies, which may be why numerous productions were underway almost as soon as the last boy was brought out, unconscious … but alive. Oscar winners seemed especially drawn to it. Fresh from their amazing “Free Solo,” directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi talked to the participants and revisited the foreboding, claustrophobic underground underwater environment for their documentary “The Rescue.”

“Thirteen Lives” is director Ron Howard's take on the subject. It's available on Amazon Prime. Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell and Joel Edgerton shed all traces of their leading man personas to play wonky guys, two Brits and an Aussie physician, who shared the dark hobby of skin-diving in flooded caves, and saving folks who got in trouble down there. They would play key roles in the rescue, but so would parents, government officials, Thai Navy SEAL divers, and thousands of volunteers from across the country and around the world who took part in the amazing effort.

Knowing how the story ends, surprisingly, doesn't lessen the tense excitement of watching the film. There's a lot of explaining to do, a lot of connecting the dots, to get audiences a world away up to speed, not only about physical challenges of the cave, but also about the Thai countryside, and especially the culture, surrounding the dramatic events.

A versatile veteran, Howard comes at the task with a spare, almost documentary style that honors the Thai culture merely by observing and respecting its nuances. While the divers in the cave comprised an international crew, virtually the whole country of Thailand mobilized on the surface, undertaking Herculean water diversion projects among other their other efforts, and sacrificing that year's rice crop in the process.

Mortensen and Farrell, who insisted on doing their own diving, are similarly workmanlike in their roles, in wetsuits most of the time, lugging their air tanks behind them, emerging from the water with new scrapes and abrasions on exposed skin.

Going in, the audience expects gripping action, and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's underwater work is some of the best to ever reach the big screen. But the real drama comes with the characters, in their setbacks as much as their victories. Often those are one in the same, as when they first come upon the boys alive, only to realize that they're not going to be able to get them out.

The plan they finally come up with is as audacious as it is dangerous, played for the highest stakes – the boys' lives.

In a zoom press conference for the film, screenwriter William Nicholson summed it up: “To my astonishment, this was not a simple story, a story about some kids stuck in a cave, oh, it's difficult, and then they're rescued. It was much more complicated than that. There are all these emotional climaxes that are the meat and drink of good drama. That is the kind of thing that drama can do and documentary can't.

“Cinema is an empathy machine,” he continued. “Our job is to find the moments that connect with everybody. Even if you have never been in a cave, you say, I know what they're going through, and your heart is hammering as you watch it.”

“I felt that I could apply everything I had done in my career to this story,” added director Ron Howard. “What the real rescuers had done, what the real volunteers had done, what the government officials in Thailand had done was give us this object lesson in cooperation, cross-cultural cooperation and risk taking that were remarkable. 

“I wrote on my script, this is the anatomy of a miracle,” he went on. “Miracles can happen but they require effort, beyond the commitment and the prayer. This was an example of people putting themselves in harm's way, physically, emotionally, from a career standpoint, politically, to do the right thing.”

“This is a story about hope rewarded, concluded screenwriter Nicholson. “I love that sort of thing, stories that say human beings are better than we know.”