Thirteen Lives: Ron Howard takes a dry reportorial approach to Thai cave rescue retelling

The most anxious moment in Thirteen Lives , which dramatizes the daring attempt to rescue 12 boys and their football coach trapped deep inside a flooded Thai cave in 2018, comes when the mission enters its home stretch. Chris Jewell ( Tom Bateman ), one of the four divers dubbed the “awesome foursome,” loses the guide rope on the return trip with the second last boy. Flailing his arms underwater with little to no visibility, he becomes so disoriented that he grabs onto an electrical cable that leads him the wrong way. On realising this, he surfaces to reorient himself. He places the boy on a rock outcrop in the previous chamber and waits for a fellow diver bringing up the rear with the final boy. The wait is as anxious as it gets, and it shows on Bateman’s face. For the viewer watching, knowing the outcome doesn’t lessen our own anxiety. This so-close-yet-so-far-moment establishes all the elements that needed surmounting to get the boys home. The divers had to guide their bound and unconscious charges, lugging oxygen cylinders, and squeezing through narrow fissures in a labyrinth of a cave system — against the current as monsoonal rains flooded in.

If there ever was a victory-against-all-odds story begging for a Hollywood treatment, this was it. Director Ron Howard, his cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and his sound designer Michael Fentum convey the oppressively claustrophobic conditions in these underwater sequences where any mistake could prove fatal. And where lives and all hope hang by a thread — literally. The rope acted as the only lifeline.

The world held its collective breath over the course of a seemingly impossible search and rescue mission for the 13 lives. The story attracted the attention of news broadcasters in every country because it marked a rare instance of international cooperation. Given the daunting logistics of the mission, it needed disparate individuals and groups to work together above and beyond their professional skillset. The inherent drama of such a rescue mission made it ripe for retellings. Oscar-winning duo Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin got there first with the Nat Geo documentary, The Rescue. Now the two streaming giants face off: Howard’s feature treatment for Amazon Prime Video will be followed by a six-part miniseries set to debut on Netflix on September 22.

It is hard to believe Howard has made over 30 movies. Not one stands out as a defining effort. Apollo 13 comes close. Rush? Maybe. But he isn’t the kind of director whose work earns him his own adjective. He is the journeyman who is hired because he is a general-purpose director with no discernible voice of his own or personal style. What you get with Howard is unadorned adequacy. We see this in the cautious reportorial approach he takes to the story of Thirteen Lives. He sticks to the outline of the real events, alternating between the macro and the micro factors at play. If the movie maintains a grip on the viewer, it has less to do with Howard’s filmmaking brio, more with the built-in thriller mechanisms of the story being told. The workman-like execution prevents the movie from being anything beyond a serviceable survival thriller. Take for instance how Howard overlays a graphic to inform us each time the divers reach a checkpoint. The progress bar may be a tool meant for the viewer’s convenience but it also weakens the immersion.

The prologue takes us back to June 23, 2018: With FIFA World Cup underway, football fever has gripped the globe. After a friendly game, the 12 boys of Chiang Rai Province’s local junior football team (who call themselves the Wild Boars) go to the Tham Luang caves with their 25-year-old coach for a birthday celebration — only to get trapped when an unforeseen spell of heavy rain floods the caves. While a dramatization should allow for sharper and more engaging storytelling, it isn’t quite the case here. Last year’s documentary The Rescue fares a lot better in both these regards, capturing the urgency of the operation and complexity of its subjects. Though Howard refrains from using Hollywood polish in the characterisations of the divers, he also ends up losing the emotional depth and texture these unlikely heroes brought to the doc. The tension between the divers and the Thai Navy SEALs is diluted too. The death of Saman Kunan feels like nothing more than a lesson as to why the Thai government should let professional divers handle the rescue. Because the movie omits Kunan’s backstory of how he was an ex-Navy SEAL working in a volunteer capacity.

As Richard Stanton and John Volanthen, Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell play up the unassuming, swagger-less nature of their middle-aged diving hobbyists. Mortensen and Farrell are the kind of actors whose movie-star aura isn’t so strong it overshadows the roles they play here. The Rescue attempted to probe the minds of the two divers, who enjoy the solitude and darkness that come with their extreme sporting pastime. But Thirteen Lives insists on keeping us at a cold distance. Richard is portrayed as an unemotional loner. At least, some emotion registers on Farrell’s face when John, being a dad of a young boy himself, is on tenterhooks when a boy he is rescuing stops breathing. When a pump worker, who became trapped during the search operation, panics and nearly drowns while being rescued by Richard and John, the two realise the young boys who were much deeper in the cave cannot be transported if they are conscious. This is where the Australian anaesthetist Richard Harris (Joel Edgerton) is brought on board, along with two other divers Jason Mallinson (Paul Gleeson) and Chris. Harris will drug the kids with ketamine to allow the divers to safely guide their unconscious bodies out of the cave.

Ever so often, the film detours to show the parents of the children restlessly waiting for any news, the Thai government and military officials working behind the scenes, and the volunteers coordinating a groundwater draining operation. This is as much a national operation after all. While the spotlight is on the British divers, the movie reminds us of the work of locals who made their jobs easier: be it the engineers who ensured the water didn’t further flood the caves from above and the farmers who allowed the water to be diverted onto their fields at great cost to their crops. The focus is indeed not on the thirteen lives of the title, but on those who ensured all thirteen of those lives were rescued. For the stories of the boys, you will have to wait for the upcoming miniseries, seeing as the stories are now officially Netflix-owned IP.

Thirteen Lives is streaming on Amazon Prime Video 

Prahlad Srihari is a film and music writer based in Bengaluru.

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