Thirteen Lives Review: A Redundant Dramatization of an Incredible Rescue

Ron Howard’s Thirteen Lives gets lost in a story that’s already been told.

Thirteen Lives
Photo: MGM

Ron Howard’s Thirteen Lives dramatizes the 2018 rescue of a young soccer team from a flooded cave in northern Thailand. The film’s first and rather rushed opening stretch focuses on the young soccer players and their coach, and as the dialogue is spoken entirely in Thai, the viewer may begin to question why a Westerner like Howard was recruited to oversee the project in the first place. And then the white people show up, and it becomes clear that Thirteen Lives isn’t actually all that concerned with the soccer team.

Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen play, respectively, John Volanthen and Richard Stanton, the highly trained British civilian cave divers who led the effort to find and retrieve the boys and their coach. Throughout, William Nicholson’s screenplay neatly divides their personas into opposing complements: Volanthen the soft-hearted humanist and Stanton the jaded realist. This, of course, provides for some dramatic tension—something that the remarkably staid Thirteen Lives could have actually use more of—when Stanton insists the boys can’t be saved, and Volanthen persists in finding a way to extract them from the flooded caverns.

There’s an overdetermined inevitability to such drama. Movie conventions tell us that Volanthen and Stanton will find a way to get the boys and their coach out of the flooded caverns, and history tells us that they did exactly that, with the help of an anesthesiologist named Harry Harris (Joel Edgerton). As such, one of the major challenges of writing and directing Thirteen Lives must have been the recentness of the events that it depicts.

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The Tham Luang cave rescue has been kept in the popular consciousness not only by its contemporaneous coverage in global media, but also by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s The Rescue. And so, Howard and Nicholson seemingly set out to address the challenge of the story’s overexposure in international news media by leaning into it, giving us a procedural, at times almost journalistic, depiction of the rescue.

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The date and time appears with relentless consistency at the top of almost every scene, sometimes accompanied by a basically unparseable map of where the rescuers are as they swim through tight passages filled by rainwater. The effect achieved is less one of ratcheting tension than of unadorned documentation, which leaves the effort to reinterpret this already thoroughly documented story through the tropes of a feature film feeling rather moot.

Not that there isn’t any effort to unearth a conventional narrative arc somewhere in the heap of available information on the incident. There’s some disagreement between Volanthen and Stanton, but not too much. There’s also some difficulty getting the local Thai government, headed by Governor Narongsak (Sahajak Boonthanakit), to cooperate, but not too much. Perhaps Nicholson and Howard are trying to craft an unabashed tribute to professional rescue and aid workers in the era of Covid-19, or to avoid landing too hard on the “white savior” perspective on the story. If so, it’s not clear they succeed on either count.

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Certainly, cinematographer Saombhu Mikdeeprom’s camera effectively situates us in the caves with the divers and gives us a greater sense of that enclosed environment than documentary footage could. And somewhere along the way, Thirteen Lives wrings a couple moments of suspense out of this scenario. The depiction of the drowning death of a here nameless Thai Navy SEAL (Wirot Nilphongamphai) is almost as unnerving as it’s surely intended to be. But overall, if one benefit of fiction is that it can take us beyond mere record-keeping, that’s one potential that the filmmakers appear relatively uninterested in exploiting.

Avoiding excessively heightened melodrama, Thirteen Lives doesn’t substitute it with much that one couldn’t already find in the copious amount of available coverage of the real-life incident. For one, the focus on the perspective of government officials and foreign rescuers adds little to what is already known about the Tham Luang cave rescue. More damning, though, is that across this 147-minute film, comparatively little time is spent with the boys or their families. Which is to say that Thirteen Lives gets lost in a story that’s already been told.

Score: 
 Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell, Joel Edgerton, Tom Bateman, Paul Gleeson, Pattrakorn Tungsupakul, Tui Thiraphat Sajakul, James Teeradon Supapunpinyo, Sahajak Boonthanakit, Weir Sukollawat Kanaros  Director: Ron Howard  Screenwriter: William Nicholson  Distributor: MGM  Running Time: 147 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2022

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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