Back in the day, a movie like Thirteen Lives would almost certainly have had a fall theatrical run to prepare it for the upcoming awards race. Directed by multiple Oscar winner Ron Howard and starring Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell, the movie dramatizes a riveting story from the recent past: the 2018 rescue of 12 boys and their soccer coach from a flooded cave in northern Thailand. There’s even a guaranteed heartwarming ending!
But things have changed in the movie business, and Thirteen Lives was released in early August on Amazon Prime Video. I gave it a watch.
The deal
Fresh from soccer practice, 12 kids and their young assistant coach take a hike into the Tham Luang Nang Non cave complex. While they’re inside, early monsoon rains pelt the area and flood the normally walkable cave.
When the boys don’t return, the provincial governor (Sahajak Boonthanakit) mobilizes a task force. Royal Thai Navy SEALs struggle to navigate the cave’s sinuous flooded passages, so the government brings in a couple of British volunteers with cave-diving expertise: down-to-earth family man John Volanthen (Farrell) and prickly loner-type Rick Stanton (Mortensen).
Volanthen and Stanton find the missing 13 youths, alive and clinging to a rock ledge. But they’re starving and running out of oxygen, and they lack the high-level diving skills required to exit their watery prison. Meanwhile, more rainstorms are forecast.
The two Englishmen cook up a rescue plan so risky and unprecedented that it’s imaginable only as a last resort.
Will you like it?
If your most recent exposure to Howard’s cinematic oeuvre is the broad melodrama of Hillbilly Elegy, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how no-nonsense Thirteen Lives is. The unadorned story already tugs at our heartstrings, and Howard and screenwriter William Nicholson have made the wise decision not to add any schmaltz. Even the score by Benjamin Wallfisch builds tension without being obtrusive.
While Farrell and Mortensen get top billing, the story hasn’t been reshaped to rotate around their characters. Thirteen Lives is a mammoth ensemble procedural in the tradition of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. While bits of character development pop up here and there, the emphasis is on offering a journalistic overview of a crisis that involved officials, military personnel, press and volunteers from all over the world.
As an inevitable result, the movie lacks focus, repeatedly offering tantalizing threads of stories only to snatch them away. We’ve barely met a young volunteer diver before we’re watching him drown. The fact that some of the trapped boys were stateless refugees gets only a quick mention, as do the governor’s political woes.
A subplot involving the diversion of rainwater from sinkholes is so rushed that the main players barely make an impression. Still, that subplot offers a crucial reminder that the rescue involved not just a few foreigners but also hundreds of ingenious, determined Thai engineers, volunteers and farmers who allowed their land to be flooded for the cause.
The actors who do have more screen time give their characters hints of depth that aren’t on the page. Despite their clashing dispositions, Volanthen and Stanton have a believable rapport. In the crucial role of the Australian anesthetist on whom their plan hinges, Joel Edgerton manages to convey an array of emotions — skepticism, guilt, resolve — without many lines.
Thirteen Lives is a story about heroism in which no one is a maverick. Everyone is vulnerable and sometimes overwhelmed, and everyone is reluctant to take chances with the boys’ lives until it’s clear that the alternative is unthinkable. There may be no single protagonist to root for, but I’ll take Howard’s vision over some more Hollywoodized version in which grumpy Stanton — who announces early on that he doesn’t like kids — turns into a big old softie.
The film instills a healthy respect for the wonders and terrors of nature. The scenes in the underwater passages are well choreographed, often using a first-person viewpoint, and genuinely scary. (If you experience claustrophobia, you will be feeling it.)
By the end of the movie, we grasp a central irony. For all the international power behind their rescue, it’s still borderline miraculous that the boys emerged alive from the cave, a death trap into which they’d hiked with relative ease before the rains began. Thirteen Lives may not be an awards contender, but it’s a solid survival drama that reminds us everything can change in an instant.
If you like this, try…
The Rescue (2021; Disney+): This documentary about the Tham Luang rescue, from the makers of Free Solo, swept up a bunch of film festival honors. The divers emerge from it as more vivid “characters” than they are in Thirteen Lives, with Stanton coming off as endearingly goofy in contrast to Mortensen’s brooding portrayal of him.
All Thirteen: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys’ Soccer Team (Candlewick, 288 pages. $24.99): While the story of the boys’ amazing survival has obvious appeal to older kids, Howard’s film doesn’t focus on them. For a different perspective, try Christina Soontornvat’s acclaimed nonfiction account in book form.
Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Cave on Earth (Random House, 320 pages, $18): Why were volunteer cave divers able to pull off a rescue that Navy SEALs could not? For a detailed answer, read this 2011 book in which Vermont author James M. Tabor delves into the often deadly intricacies of cave diving.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Thirteen Lives 30”
This article appears in Aug 31 – Sep 6, 2022.
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