Thirteen Lives is a fine addition to the list of Hollywood rescue classics

In what must be some sort of a Hollywood record, Ron Howard’s _Thirteen Lives_ (streaming now on Amazon Prime Video), a ‘rescue movie’ based on the real life Tham Luang cave rescue, arrives a mere four years after the actual incident. Twelve members of a Thai schoolboy football team, aged 11-16 were trapped alongside their coach inside of the flooded Tham Luang Nang Non cave in Chiang Rai province, Northern Thailand. After a two-week long ordeal, everybody trapped was rescued thanks to a massive, internationally coordinated effort from Thai military SEALs, cave divers and doctors from around the world. Given the short turnaround time, I was apprehensive about how Thirteen Lives would turn out, despite the ensemble they’d put together: Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen playing British cave divers John Volanthen and Richard Stanton, respectively, with Joel Edgerton and Tom Bateman in supporting roles. But Howard and the supremely talented cast have delivered a superbly shot, empathetically written film that strains against the mould of the Hollywood rescue movie, while somehow still clinging on to its best values. Forget _Avatar_ , the kind of artistry seen in some of the underwater scenes in Thirteen Lives will always be more impressive than VFX to me. Volanthen and Stanton’s first dive takes the audience right alongside them, in the middle of a powerful incoming current and the effect is exhilarating. This would have been a real treat to see on a high-quality large screen, I imagine. Howard has other classics on his CV that involve shooting in radically constrained spaces — Apollo 13 comes to mind immediately, but he has surpassed himself here. Thirteen Lives is a fine addition to the list of Hollywood rescue classics, and yet it’s not like any other movie on that roster, especially in terms of its overall visual design and the distinct lack of ‘rousing’, Howard Shore-esque background music. This shows Howard’s awareness of genre staples and his willingness to ‘respond’ to them. Search and rescue If Bollywood tragics have learned, over time, that Jimmy Sheirgill never gets the girl, Hollywood diehards have learnt that Matt Damon is perennially in need of rescue. In Christopher Nolan’s 2014 sci-fi movie Interstellar, he played a character called Mann who gets stuck on an inhospitable planet and engineers an elaborate rescue attempt for himself. Next year, he starred in Ridley Scott’s_The Martian_, which literally had ‘Bring Him Home’ on the poster. Years ago, however Damon’s career began with a classic rescue began: Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1994), co-starring Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore and Edward Burns. For my money, this remains one of the great man’s best all-round efforts and it earned him his second Oscar win as Best Director. The cinematography in particular, by Janusz Kaminski, was stunning and really lent an edge to the high-octane military drama unfolding. Yes, the movie had a problem with unabashed sentimentality like another Tom Hanks staple, Forrest Gump, but on the whole the emotional drama worked and we were fully invested in the fates of Private James Ryan (Damon) as well as those of everybody searching for him in the contested town of Neuville. Tom Hanks is, in many ways, Hollywood’s archetypal Everyman which makes him perfect to lead a rescue film, as Saving Private Ryan proved. Another rescue classic led by Hanks which I personally enjoyed a lot was Captain Philips (2013). Directed by Paul Greengrass (director of the Jason Bourne trilogy starring Matt Damon), Captain Philips is inspired by the eponymous real-life hero, whose ship, the Maersk Alabama, was hijacked by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean in 2009. Hanks’ performance was praised by critics and audiences alike—at various points in the story, he is a victim, a hero, rescuer and rescued and Hanks’ subtle emotional shifts are working overtime in this fast-paced script. Christopher Nolan’s 2017 war epic Dunkirk was a tremendous technical achievement, particularly in its central conceit of portraying the real-life evacuation efforts almost entirely wordlessly. Talented young actors like Fionn Whitehead and Barry Keoghan rubbed shoulders with Nolan regulars like Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy and the great Kenneth Branagh. Once again, this was very much a large-screen movie and the practical effects deployed were very, very good. In recent years, like a lot of Hollywood staples have suffered, the rescue movie too has been caught up in a cycle of sameness. Think of an actor like John Krasinski, once the likeable Jim Halpert from The Office, the Hollywood equivalent of the boy next door. Krasinksi’s recent filmography has included a string of military thrillers where he plays machismo-driven all-American heroes that are very much in the white saviour mode. These include the film 13 Hours and Amazon Prime Video’s series Jack Ryan, which has recently been renewed for a third season. As Alison Willmore put it in 2018, “Cubicle drone Jim Halpert has remade himself as an action hero, and a particular kind — a reluctant but stalwart defender of an American way of life. 13 Hours may have been the work of Bay, that auteur of explosions (The Rock), bombast (Pearl Harbor), and robot alien franchises (Transformers 1–5), but it wasn’t just another shoot-’em-up. 13 Hours was a movie about a 2012 tragedy that became a persistent right-wing rallying point and a renewed source of contention as Hillary Clinton ran for office in 2016, when the movie came out.” It wasn’t as simple a matter as seeing an actor with a drastically changed physical look, Willmore went on to specify. It was something much more insidious, something indicative of the way the rescue movie had been corrupted towards suiting a particular, very pointed political agenda. “While Bay insisted that his film had ‘no political agenda’ and that its timing, a January release during the presidential race, was not strategic, plenty of people on both sides of the aisle read it differently. 13 Hours tried to stake out middle ground between respectful cinema about real American losses and swaggering spectacle from the man responsible for Armageddon. The weirdness to watching Krasinski in the midst of it had nothing to do with his new look. It came from the cognitive dissonance of seeing an actor whose onscreen persona had previously run so heavily toward the funny-snarky-sensitive now surrounded by machismo, brandishing an assault rifle, muttering about government incompetence, and barking frustration at CIA agents who are portrayed as arrogant, sniveling Ivy League snobs.” Where Thirteen Hours succeeds Its technical artistry apart, Thirteen Hours improves upon the failures of some of the aforementioned films at the screenplay level too. First off, the Thai actors and story arcs are given due importance and the Thai military’s contribution has never been minimized. The fact that two Thai military personnel lost their lives in the rescue attempt has been neither exploited nor ignored entirely—Howard finds a way of incorporating it in the screenplay in a respectful manner. Second, Howard is extremely mindful of the white saviour narrative blind spot. At no point are we allowed to forget that Stanton and Volanthen’s status as outsiders at the cave. This is handled delicately yet unflinchingly in the scenes where Stanton displays zero tolerance for superstitions and deities and divine intervention. Neither side’s point of view is glorified and yet, there is a sense of subtle cultural clash being communicated to the audience. Third, Howard’s collaboration with the acclaimed Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom is one of perfect artistic synergy. Mukdeeprom is known for his work with the Thai master Apichatpong Weerasethakul, especially the latter’s Cannes winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). If you’ve seen this un-describable masterpiece, you’ll know that Mukdeeprom has a particular felicity with underwater cinematography and he uses that to the hilt in Thirteen Lives. When we’re shown the reaction of the kids as they realise the clock is ticking on their rescue, the claustrophobia of the approaching water is perfectly captured. When Stanton and Volanthen are figuring out the underwater logistics and order of moving the kids out, the frame tells the audience everything they need to know in terms of challenges and advantages in front of the divers. Conversely, when we first see the children at the beginning of the movie, trading jibes on the football pitch, joyously roaring at the wind atop their bikes, the wide-angle shots communicate a sense of limitless freedom and that feeling of invulnerability you have as a teenager. Mukdeeprom’s work is first-rate throughout, across a wide array of surroundings, constrained or otherwise. Thirteen Lives, in the end, does more than enough to shake up the framework of the Hollywood rescue movie. It avoids falling into the American exceptionalism trap and puts its faith in its strong, basic filmmaking values and impeccable craft. Watch it to have a little bit of your faith in the old-fashioned Hollywood blockbuster restored. Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.