Almost certainly anyone who can remember back to 2018 can remember the incident in the Tham Luang Cave in Thailand involving 12 boys soccer team members and their young coach. If you don’t know, those boys went cave exploring when a monsoon hit early and trapped them 4 kilometers underground. What ensued was a 17-day rescue mission that involved over 10,000 people from all over the world to try and get them out. It was an international news phenomenon the likes we don’t often see. Thirteen Lives by legendary filmmaker Ron Howard is the story of this rescue, and the heroes inside and out of the cave who came to help.
Thirteen Lives begins with some very beautiful shots of the Thailand landscape and shows us our team of boys wrapping up soccer practice and heading to a cave before they celebrate a teammates birthday party. These early scenes move quickly, but I appreciate how much effort they took to show us various shots of the land and I like how they brought us into the story with no English dialogue until at least the 10–12-minute mark. Everything else is mostly spoken in Thai. Once we know that the teens are stuck in the cave, we don’t see them again for almost half the film.
Instead, we are introduced to Richard Stanton (Viggo Mortenson) and John Volanthen (Colin Farrell), two cave diving experts and cave rescuers from Britain. They, along with the help of the Thai Navy Seals, navigate the extremely intricate cave system for 2.5 miles and find the boys, and the rescue has them and their team (supported by Joel Edgerton as Dr. Richard Harris and Tom Bateman as Chris Jewell) traveling back and forth numerous times to bring the boys to safety.
Now, like I said at the forefront of the review, if you watched the news around this time in 2018, you for sure heard of this story. It was of no surprise to the audience going into this movie that the end result would be that all 13 trapped boys would make it out alive. Such is the theme of the survival films in the same vein as 1993’s Alive, 1995’s Apollo 13 or 2010’s 127 Hours.
What Thirteen Lives does well is give us plenty of intriguing story, set up and narrative around the rescue, as well as the rescue itself being well filmed and clearly a focus of the story. However, it seemed as though Howard wanted the reveal that the kids were alive to be a huge narrative point, even though we know that they, in fact, were. As such, we don’t get to see them for most of the first half of the film, to the point where the audience doesn’t even see them get trapped, which I do wish we got to see.
One other major issue I had with this film was its pacing. Thirteen Lives is a bloated 2h 29m long, which is extremely long for a film of this type, yet the first 30-45 minutes of the film felt like the plot was moving at breakneck speed to reach a runtime more in the range of 1h 20m. We go from seeing the boys getting trapped to being on Day 8 or 9 of the rescue within 35 minutes of each other. It really moves way too fast and as such I had a hard time getting into it early.
However, once the movie settles in around that halfway point, the plot slows way down, and we do get to see more of the characters and events don’t feel as fast. I just wished they had decided one way or the other on how the movie would be paced. It made it feel like they wanted so badly to get to the rescue that they zoomed past most other things to get there.
As with any of these types of movies, historical accuracy can be a make-or-break element of the film. With Thirteen Lives, luckily, Howard indeed kept almost all of the events in the film accurate to the real-life events and timelines, only changing minor details about when certain events occurred along the way. Everything from the sound design to the actual procedural damage the divers took (showing the viewer that this rescue was not easy even for the absolute best in the world) that we got to notice only subtly felt like it was well thought out and intentional.
Disappointingly, they were unable to film mostly in Thailand, instead opting to film in various locations around Australia, however this was due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and I believe that had they been able to, they would have filmed in Thailand itself. I did also wish that they had removed the plotline involving diverting water away from the mountains, as it didn’t really feel like those scenes belonged and could have saved more runtime of the film to either cut completely or focus on more characterization of our main characters. However, the film did wrap up quite nicely and didn’t feel like it dragged on too long.
The acting in this film was solid, especially as we got into more of the second half of the film. I felt Farrell and Mortenson were solid in their roles, however I wished they hadn’t made Mortenson’s character so pessimistic. The real-life Richard Stanton was a hero and an expert cave rescuer, and this movie made it seem like he didn’t want to be there in some parts. I also found Joel Edgerton’s performance as Dr. Harris to be unusually flat at times, which is a shame since I really enjoy Edgerton as an actor.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to survival movies, there are only a handful that live on an upper echelon of filmmaking. While this movie doesn’t quite make it to that highest level, it is certainly on the steps of greatness, and if it weren’t for some factors that really detract from the overall early movie viewing experience, it would have been truly great. That said, Thirteen Lives is entertaining, gripping, thrilling and fascinating all in one, and I do feel satisfied having seen it, however I am seriously not envious of any of those rescue workers and certainly don’t have the guts to traverse any caves for the next 15 years or so.
