Thirteen Lives
A dramatisation of the Thai Cave rescue of 2018, where twelve members of a kid’s football team and their coach got trapped in a flooded cave and had to be rescued. Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen star.
I have already seen The Rescue1 but this film came up while talking some pub bollocks the other day so we watched it when we got home.
Ron Howard directs, and proves to be a good choice for the project. It’s got that sort of dry slightly dull Clint Eastwood tone you want when telling a horrific true story like this.
You have to get over Farrell’s slight iffy accent work but after about 20 minutes the film proves to be a real nail biter. The story tells itself and if it hadn’t really happened you probably wouldn’t believe it. The film tries to capture the scale of the operation but it’s human nature to want to focus on a few characters, and ultimately that’s where it ends up.
I can’t imagine how gruelling it must have been to make this, it looks like an absolute nightmare and they do not hold back on the actual diving scenes. I also can’t imagine how disappointing it must have been to do all this then to get pipped to the post by a documentary that covers a lot of the same ground, and contains real footage of the events.
Perhaps it’s a redundant film due to the slew of documentaries and books covering the same topic, but in its own right it’s a well made and effective piece of work.