Thirteen Lives: Bangkok, We Have a Problem
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
Thirteen Lives, the new feature film from Ron Howard, is about the real-life story of 12 boys on a Thai soccer team who were trapped with their young coach in a flooded cave for 18 days in 2018.
It’s a film that has some obvious parallels to Howard’s Apollo 13, a docudrama about a small group of endangered people in a claustrophobic space, with worldwide media attention on a rescue effort and a happy ending, thanks to technological ingenuity, courage, and collective effort.
Thirteen Lives has more modest ambitions than the above-mentioned 1995 blockbuster. It boasts just a handful of name actors and has a one-week theatrical run, starting Friday, before landing on the streaming service Prime Video on August 5.
Howard’s film loses some impact because of the recent familiarity of the story. As well, the rescue story has already been told in an acclaimed 2021 National Geographic documentary The Rescue by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Free Solo).
That film similarly recounts the cave rescue as a procedural thriller, focusing primarily on the mind-boggling mechanics of rescuing the boys from the cave, conducted by British civilian cave diving specialists, retired fireman Rick Stanton (played here by Mortensen) and IT specialist John Volanthen (Farrell).
Thirteen Lives essentially breaks into two strands: The restrained, somewhat dutiful first half focuses on the local Thai community. Opening scenes show the boys playing soccer on a June evening, teasing each other (one of the young ones has a Sponge-Bob Squarepants birthday cake) and, on a whim, deciding to bicycle over to the nearby cave to check it out before dinner. The line of their abandoned bicycles at the outside of the cave becomes a recurrent image in the film.
By dinnertime in the local village, parents of the birthday boy begin to worry that he hasn’t returned. We learn that the monsoon season has arrived unexpectedly early, and the mouth of the cave is flooded. The provincial governor, Narongsak Osatanakorn (Sahajak Boonthanakit) is summoned from his dinner to handle the emergency, and as the crisis hits international media, finds himself responding to the humane need to save the kids and the political optics: Make Thailand look good.
The country’s Navy SEALS are summoned but, inexperienced in cave diving, they discover they can only go a short way into the water-filled caves. The local community’s efforts are encapsulated by a subplot involving a young water engineer, Thanet Natisri (Nophand Boonyai), who assembles a volunteer team to divert millions of gallons of water away from the mountainside cave, destroying the farmer’s crops for the sake of the children.
Howard’s film shifts into a more urgent and familiar gear with the introduction of the two middle-aged Englishmen volunteer. The actors efficiently establish their characters’ defining quirks without going deep into histories or motivation. Mortensen as Rick, a pessimistic retired firefighter, convinced for a long stretch that they’ve taken on a task of retrieving corpses. Farrell as John — father of a son the age of the entrapped boys —looks bookish in horn-rimmed spectacles but maintains a stiff-upper-lip optimism.
After locating the team on a ledge more than two miles deep in the cave, the divers can see no way to extract them. In a Hail Mary play, they decide to call in an Australian colleague, a fellow diver and anesthetist, Dr. Richard Harris (Joel Edgerton), who employs both his skills in the rescue. The execution of the plan, of anesthetizing the boys and delivering them like newborns back to their parents, adds a nightmarish frisson to the triumphant ending.
The pace of Thirteen Lives accelerates as Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Call Me By Your Name, Memoria) takes us from the pastoral football field to the bustling village to the torch-lit underwater caves.
Howard’s well-intentioned effort to create a panoramic and inclusive picture comes at a cost, particularly in the depth of characterization. One is left feeling that, though the film runs almost two-and-a-half hours, it barely scratches several surfaces.
Significantly, Thirteen Lives pays almost no attention to one of the extraordinary aspects of the event: the power of inaction in a predicament where panic meant death. The coach, a 25-year-old former Buddhist monk, Ekkapol Chanthawong, taught the boys, aged 11 to 16, to meditate as a way of reducing anxiety and maintaining their energy during their ordeal.
The omission is perhaps understandable given the limited cinematic potential of watching people remaining calm by meditating in the dark for two-and-a-half weeks.
Thirteen Lives. Directed by Ron Howard. Written by William Nicholson, story by Don MacPherson. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell, Joel Edgerton, Sahajak Boonthanakit and Nophand Boonyai. Opens theatrically July 29 and streams on Prime Video from August 5.