Ron Howard’s ‘Thirteen Lives’, a feat of endurance about the 18-day effort to rescue a youth soccer team from Thailand’s Tham Luang cave in 2018, gazes in awe at two unassuming men: Rick Stanton and John Volanthen, which actors Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell play with their reduced magnetism until these charismatic movie stars look like balls of spit left to air dry. The two wrinkled, grizzled Britons don’t look or act particularly heroically. “I don’t even like kids,” Rick says — thankfully not in front of the press, whose two men recoil like photosensitive bats.
Yet Rick and John are among the few cave divers with the physical and mental stamina to endure a six-hour caving in wetsuits through tight recesses in near-zero visibility as fanged stalactites scrape against their dive tanks. ‘air. No wonder neither they nor William Nicholson’s screenplay, based on a story by him and Don MacPherson, have time to mess up. It’s a pragmatic tale of a nearly impossible mission: first, find the trapped boys, and even harder, swim them out.
Howard doesn’t waste his energy casting doubt on the outcome. (The operation succeeds, with two victims.) He is gripped by the mechanics of how the divers pulled it off, a feat that needs very few cymbals from composer Benjamin Wallfisch to play like a thriller. Watching Rick and John’s team (which grows to include roles played by Joel Edgerton, Tom Bateman and Paul Gleeson) swim back and forth towing the boys – ‘packages’, Rick calls them – is exhausting . Audiences spend an hour of runtime experiencing the primal terror of being underground, underwater, and – in a detail omitted from early reporting – sedated. Meanwhile, sound designer Michael Fentum escalates the agony with every helmet scrape on rock and the panicked squeal of a bottle running out of oxygen.
It’s a race against the water, which sinks into chasms that flood the cave and create dangerous currents. Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom uses rain like film noir uses shadows, creating a darkness that overwhelms the cast. A radio show during the monsoon season hit the area earlier than expected, like this horror trope where convicted teenagers hear about a serial killer’s escape from prison.
The villain of the film, Howard implies, is climate change. As for its heroes, the real divers have already publicly rejected the role, a reluctance that fits with the film’s charity of reducing an event involving 5,000 helpers from 17 countries to a white savior story. To balance, Howard includes the local governor (Sahajak Boonthanakit) pressured to make risky decisions, the irrigation engineer (Gerwin Widjaja) organizing a volunteer sandbag squad, and a group of farmers led by Neungruthai Bungngern-Wynne who accept to destroy their harvest for a risky plan. This show of international unity sounds like a thesis that Howard doesn’t want to let slip: wouldn’t it be great if the planet came together to prevent environmental crises before more lives are at risk?
Focusing on the rescuers leaves little time for the rescued. All we learn from the boys’ struggle is that their coach (Pattrakorn Tungsupakul), a former Buddhist monk, taught them meditation to conquer their fears. Naturally, one begins to expect their Zen practice to factor into the plot, for a child to wake up underwater and calm down. It’s not, and it’s unclear whether Howard left at this point as a dangling factoid or as a hint that the kids deserved more credit for their own survival.
Thirteen Lives
Rated PG-13 for foul language and scary imagery. Duration: 2h27. Watch on Amazon Prime.