The Rescue: How a Global Call to Action Made an Impossible Underwater Cave Mission Possible
By Karen Gordon
Rating: A
There's an “Avengers Assemble” moment in the superb, riveting documentary The Rescue.
A call goes out to the most experienced cave divers around the world, a small group of otherwise normal people, who drop what they’re doing, grab their passports and head to Thailand to execute a last ditch plan to rescue 13 people whose lives are in grave peril.
It’s bit of relief at an incredibly tense and difficult moment in what was, based on what we learn here, an all-but-hopeless situation. That thrilling moment, in many ways, also gets to the core of what this film is ultimately about: The willingness of ordinary people, to come together and take on incredible risk, to try to help complete strangers a half a world away.
The Rescue, directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin - the Oscar-winning team behind Free Solo - tells the story of how 12 boys, all members of the Wild Boar Soccer club, and their coach, were rescued from deep in a cave in Thailand’s Chiang Rai province after an incredible 18 days.
The cave was a familiar place to them: The boys would explore it for fun in the dry season. But it was a seasonal pleasure. The government routinely closed it down about mid-July because it would completely flood during the monsoon season.
On the June day they went in, the boys should have been safe. But an early heavy rain storm changed that. The intense rain flooded the caves so quickly that the boys and their coach were stuck. The walking paths were completely submerged turned the cave into a seascape. Now the only way out was underwater, through crooked tunnels and rock walls with passes at times so narrow that highly trained, disciplined and experienced Navy SEALs couldn’t navigate it.
It’s a story that riveted the world over the course of 18 days, with news coverage focused on the well-being of the boys and their coach. But the documentary goes where the news coverage couldn’t. The Rescue, which won the People’s Choice award for best Documentary at 2021’s TIFF, is a day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour story of just how dire the circumstances were.
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Vasarhelyi and Chin tell the story in chronological order, using first-person storytelling—from the Thai government officials in charge of the operation, a U.S Air Force Special Tactics Officer who specializes in humanitarian rescues, the cave experts and the cave divers who carried out the rescue and, in some cases, their partners. Context is added with news footage from the scene and press conferences.
Where it exists, they’ve also used footage of the actual operation. The directors fill those pieces in with dramatic reenactments using some of the divers. It’s an effective technique that brings to life the extremely complicated problems of getting even experienced cave divers in and getting then out with completely inexperienced people. One of the divers describes the conditions of the water at the time of the rescue, as diving into a muddy hole.
There were a lot of people involved in the operation. The scene outside the cave became the size of a village with the family and friends waiting and praying for the team to be rescued, as well as volunteers, government workers, Navy SEALs from Thailand and various other countries.
But the story necessarily focuses in on the men who actually planned and executed the hands-on rescue: The cave divers were a small group of ordinary, mostly middle-aged men, with one key and rare skill. They are highly experienced.
Most of them describe themselves in anti-social terms, nerds, introverts, etc., who are drawn to this incredibly dangerous fringe-sport/hobby. As one of them says, “it’s a minority sport that no one took seriously.”
In particular, the film focuses on the two British cave divers first called in to consult, retired firefighter Rich Stanton, and IT consultant John Volanthen.
They’re the ones who by chance discovered and rescued four trapped Thai pump workers in ‘chamber three,’ who were also caught off guard when the flood happened. The actual, miraculous discovery of the boys much deeper into the cave system, came later, 10 days after they were first trapped.
The fraught rescue of the four pump workers informed what would come next.
But getting the soccer team out was considerably more complicated. And at one point, the situation was so fraught, that only serendipity kept the two from getting on a plane and leaving. In the end, they reached out to a fellow cave diver, Dr. Richard Harris from Australia, who came up with a plan – albeit one even he felt was too risky.
It’s an incredible story. I had to remind myself frequently that the boys and their coach were actually rescued. But watching this unfold day-by-day underlines just how impossible the situation was.
The team was deep in the cave. Getting to the small outcrop where they were sitting meant traveling underwater through rocks walls that at times narrowed to a point where getting one person through seemed impossible, never mind children who had never done any diving before. The situation was so difficult that it was beyond the capability of trained Navy SEALs.
Vasarhelyi and Chin keep the mood and tone factual, looking at the day-to-day tangle of unsolvable problems and the degrees of complexity that faced the strategy teams and rescue teams alike. If the rescue plan had failed, the cave divers would not only have to deal with the deaths of 13 human beings, but also could be, under Thai law, charged with their deaths.
The filmmakers also focus on the human factor through the people involved, including Thai officials as well as the divers. They wrap the film, rather charmingly, in a relationship between Stanton and a Thai nurse “Amp” Bangngoen, who, lives in a village close to Chaing Rai, and volunteered as a translator during the operation. In a wonderful coincidence, they met and had a short romance when she was on vacation in the U.K.
There’s also a wonderful moment in the movie where one of the divers notes, that the Navy SEALs, sidelined by the extreme complexities of cave diving, “couldn’t figure out why these older Brits could do it and they couldn’t.” For the international group of cave divers and experts, the reverberations of their rescue, has been life changing.
Both remarkably and tragically there was ultimately one death. Saman Gunan was so moved by the plight of the boys, that he felt driven to come back to Thailand and rejoin the Navy SEALs. But the dive required expertise beyond his training. His wife, Waleeporn Gunan, obviously proud of her husband, inadvertently sums up the spirit of the operation and one of the underlying messages of the film, “Generosity is the beginning of everything. Without generosity, you cannot be a volunteer.”
The Rescue will take your breath away. It’s an incredible chronicle of a true impossible mission, of how the world can come together to save life.
And it introduces us to a small group of men who thought they were just quietly following a passion that didn’t get much respect, before the world came calling for them.
The Rescue, written and directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, featuring Rick Stanton and John Volanthen and Dr. Richard “Harry” Harris. Opens Friday, October 8 in Toronto (Hot Docs Bloor Cinema), Vancouver (International Village) and Montreal Cineplex Forum).
The film expands October 15 into other cities.