Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell star in a boring Hollywood dramatization of an incredible story that’s been told better before.
It’s been less than a year since “Free Solo” directors E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin released “The Rescue,” an extraordinary documentary about the international effort to safely remove 12 boys and their soccer coach from the depths of a flooded cave in Thailand. system in the summer of 2018. Filled with flawless re-enactments by the real divers involved, the film was (and still is) so harrowing that it seemed destined to endure as the definitive narrative of this story. What I wrote in my review at the time.: “‘The Rescue’ is intense enough that even Michael Bay and Peter Berg concede that no big-budget dramatization could match it.”
For Ron Howard, It was already too late. A showbiz veteran whose generosity of spirit and affinity for danger have always tended to strengthen each other in the service of triumphant disaster movies like “Apollo 13,” he was likely compelled by the cave rescue from the moment it happened. , Y definitely Post-production on their own version of events was well under way when Chin and Vasarhelyi’s film came out.
Narrated with no frills, less personality, and enough quiet dignity to sustain itself for 18 days (or 147 minutes), the helpful “thirteen livesit is a far cry from the kind of enhanced spectacle some of his Hollywood contemporaries could create from this material. And yet his let the story speak for itself The approach feels misjudged after a documentary so rich in big personalities, laced with stomach-churning suspense, and shadowed by a lingering sense of ethical ambivalence.
Where “The Rescue” was a nonfiction thriller about the weight of our mutual obligation and the complications of trying to shoulder it in the midst of a crisis, “Thirteen Lives” is a somber (if challenging) viggo mortensen drama about handsome white men who try not to act like movie stars when they show up in a foreign country and are tasked with saving the day.
If the value that “Thirteen Lives” offers to people who have seen “The Rescue” is paltry to the point of non-existence, Howard’s film obviously deserves to be judged on its own merits, and even viewers unfamiliar with The Tham Luang cave saga will be at least a bit caught up in the way it’s presented here. The story he tells is incredible enough to survive any shortcomings in storytelling, and Howard is too competent a filmmaker to interfere with his basic power.
Still, “Thirteen Lives” often seems riveting despite itself. From the moment it begins, the film is wrapped in the diaphanous nonchalance of a movie trying to get out of its own way. There’s a sense of predestination in the casual way Howard follows the Wild Boars football team into the caves, as William Nicholson’s script focuses our attention on the youngest child so that we have an emotional foothold later (honestly , it’s about its details, most of them as innocent and heartbreaking as a SpongeBob birthday cake). Parents worry when their children don’t come home, Chiang Rai’s outgoing governor, played by Sahajak Boonthanakit in a loosely defined role made fascinating by the balance he strikes between political opportunism and genuine concern, establishes a center of crisis and time begins to trickle down like the water that floods the caves of Tham Luang from the sinkholes above.
Time soon becomes almost as much of an issue for “Thirteen Lives” as it is for the people in it. The days roll on with little sense of escalation, and the film’s parallel subplots, the most shocking of which spotlight local farmers who have agreed to sacrifice their crops to help the rescue effort, rarely feel like they’re happening. simultaneously. Even before a pair of weary, middle-aged British cave divers arrive on the scene in the span of a single cut (Howard limits his personal stories to a single pre-trip phone call), this story already lacks a air of despair and its disarticulation is never carefully resolved enough to seem like a deliberate contrast to the film’s celebration of community spirit.
Which is not to say that “Thirteen Lives” exaggerates the individual heroism that made the rescue possible, or that it falls into the usual Hollywood trap of elevating Western do-gooders above the foreigners they deign to save. The fact that a 60-year-old retired firefighter from Essex (Mortensen as Rick Stanton) and an IT consultant from Bristol (Colin Farrell as John Volanthen) helped run the Tham Luang operation certainly makes this episode more appealing to viewers. English speakers. world, but Nicholson’s script also strives to highlight the efforts of the locals of Chiang Rai, the Royal Thai Navy and the US Air Force, and to represent all parties involved in the best light possible.
If anything, Howard’s movie is so afraid of turning this into the Stanton and Volanthen story that it almost makes them non-characters just to make sure they don’t overpower the rest of the ensemble. How else to explain Mortensen’s decision to play Rick, in real life, an introverted Herzogian goofball with an unearthly talent for cave diving and a dark sense of humor that reflects the strange solace he finds in dark places? ? Doesn’t he seem to have faith in his own abilities?
Farrell fares best as the more likable and optimistic Volanthen (the reformed bad boy who reverberates with the same dejected dignity that made his recent “After Yang” performance so powerful), but each of these men is crushed by the weight of its mission that does not leave much room for anything else. While John is shown to have a son who is roughly the same age as the Wild Boars, simply acknowledging that fact is our only idea of what might be going through his head. The actual rescue was obviously a grim affair, but even the astronauts trapped inside Apollo 13 were given more room to breathe.
The silver lining to these muted characterizations is that they draw more attention to the burden Rick and John take on just by showing up; the obligation they felt to be there isn’t explored (it can’t be easy knowing you’re one of the only people on Earth with the skills to save some strangers on the other side of the world), but “Thirteen Lives” is key. on the slippery metrics of mission success once the operation is underway. When Rick and John first arrive at the cave, it seems like they’d be heroes for rescuing even a single boy. When the entire football team meets alive, albeit in a cave chamber so elusive that their deaths still seem inevitable, it suddenly becomes clear that Rick and John will be held responsible if they fail to rescue. everybody from them.
While Howard’s film derives most of its tension from the planning and logistics of the various dives, all of which become much more complicated once Rick comes up with the crazy idea of hiring an anesthetist named Richard Harris (an affectionately skeptical Joel Edgerton), “Thirteen Lives” is at its best when navigating the narrow divide that separates a miracle from a fiasco, and when saving a life from ending it. The more practical aspects are not so well articulated. While the rescue itself is shot with a direct intensity that emphasizes the risk involved, and the immersive sound design helps convey the alien hostility of Earth’s deadliest environments, Howard is sometimes reluctant to let his audience share. the panic-inducing claustrophobia that made it so difficult. to get the children out of that cave.
It may have been too much to expect Harvard’s full sensory ethnography approach, but “Thirteen Lives” needed to more fully confront the sheer hell of what the divers had to navigate in Tham Luang for the film to settle as a more poignant reminder of that our world may not be as intractable as it seems. That’s why “The Rescue” benefits so much from prioritizing ultra-close-up intensity over a broader point of view; That is why the most modest of these films radiates the amazement of a true miracle, while the great Hollywood production has to settle for the feeling of a job well done.
Grade: C+
United Artists Releasing will premiere “Thirteen Lives” in select theaters on Friday, July 29. It will be available to stream on Amazon Prime starting Friday, August 5.
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