A film review by Craig J. Koban August 23, 2022

THIRTEEN LIVES  ½   

2022, PG-13, 147 mins.

Viggo Mortensen as Richard Stanton  /  Colin Farrell as John Volanthen  /  Joel Edgerton as Dr. Richard Harris  /  Sukollawat Kanarot as Saman Kunan  /  Theerapat Sajakul as Anand  /  Sahajak Boonthanakit as Narongsak Osatanakorn  /  Vithaya Pansringarm as General Anuphond  /  Teeradon Supapunpinyo as Ekkaphon "Ek" Chanthawong  /  Nophand Boonyai as Thanet Natisri  /  Tom Bateman as Chris Jewell  /  Paul Gleeson as Jason Mallinson  /  Lewis Fitz-Gerald as Vernon Unsworth  /  Paula Garcia as Spanish Reporter

Imagine being one of sixteen children trapped in a flooded cave for nearly three weeks...and with no apparent escape route.   

That's pure nightmare fuel for me to ponder as an adult.  I can only begin to comprehend what this frightening ordeal must have been like for a kid.   

THIRTEEN LIVES is a new Amazon Prime produced fact-based drama that chronicles a harrowing story of survival and rescue.  In the summer of 2018 the unthinkable happened: A youth soccer team - made up of kids varrying in age from 11 to 16-years-old (and with their mid-twenties assistant coach) went sightseeing in the Tham Luang Nang Non cave in northern Thailand when - without much warning to them - a massive rain storm hit and flooded the cave, resulting in all available exits being unreachable.  No contact was made with the stranded team by any member of the outside world for nearly two weeks, and from there a massive international cave rescue effort was then established to get them out alive.  

There was multiple large problems: 

The stranded survivors were over four kilometers away from the cave entrance and swimming under water without any equipment would be impossible.  They couldn't wait for the waters to subside (that would take too long), nor could water be pumped out of the cave quick enough.  Each child would have to be taken out one at a time and also given a crass course on underwater diving in the process.   

This is a story that deserves to be told, but unfortunately director Ron Howard never really finds a way of telling it in a full bodied manner. 

If there's something that the filmmaker does well it's in the relaying of the physical hardships that were involved in getting the divers to the kids and eventually out.  On a technically level, THIRTEEN LIVES is eerily authentic in its underwater diving sequences and Howard and company are able to create an anxiety-plagued level of claustrophobia in showing these brave SCUBA trained rescuers get through the tiniest of spaces to get to the kids.  Howard is no stranger to recreating historical events with a stunning verisimilitude (just look at his space disaster film in APOLLO 13 or his Depression era boxing drama in CINDERELLA MAN or his Formula One centric RUSH), and THIRTEEN LIVES - on a level of pure filmmaking craft - is undeniably masterful.  But on a human and character level, though, Howard's film is fundamentally lacking in terms of not giving audiences much personal insight into the stranded kids in question.  And for a film that's clocking in at nearly two and a half hours, I was frankly surprised by how this film fails to generate legitimate dramatic potency; it's a tense experience, yes, but it rarely moved me in the way that it clearly should have. 

THIRTEEN LIVES covers the basic nuts and bolts of this Thai soccer team that got sidetracked - on the way to a birthday party - into going to the aforementioned cave in question and getting hopelessly stuck inside of it.  All the team was hoping for was a little bit of post-game stress relief and fun, but that soon ended in absolute disaster with the torrential rains and the subsequent mass flooding.  When the boys' family don't hear from them the local government swoops in and begins to piece together what has happened, but in doing so they begin to realize that they may need to reach out for help from other countries with more experienced personnel.  Stepping in are seasoned British cave divers Richard (Viggo Mortensen) and John (Colin Farrell), who decide to join the ranks of an ever-increasing international effort to find some manner of reaching the team to discover whether or not they're still alive.  Richard and John do find the boys, which elates their families on the outside, but getting them all out safely proves to be an improbably hard mission.  The British pair bring in Doctor Harris (Joel Edgerton), who helps them devise a fairly ingenious - but highly dangerous - plan to get the team out one player at a time.  And, to be fair, before anyone decries the film for white savior elements, it should be noted that these three white men were cogs - albeit highly crucial ones - in a much larger wheel that involved over ten thousand people, including hundreds of divers, hundreds of governmental agencies, nearly a thousand police officers, and two thousand soldiers.  Also, the efforts of those to pump out over a billion liters of water from the cave cannot be undervalued. 

The first few sections of THIRTEEN LIVES are pretty sensational in terms of laying out expositional particulars of this dreadful event and explaining to audiences - with the help of on-screen maps - the real challenge of getting to the survivors and securing their freedom.  This was not just a matter of simple extraction.  First, the divers had to use all of their collective skills to navigate through all of the tight rocky terrain to get the children, and after that they had to find a way to pluck them individually out (the tricky part here was having to get SCUBA equipment that would fit boys of various ages to endure the several kilometer underwater swim and somehow train them to do so).  The solution employed was audaciously innovative, but packed so many inherent risks that it's astounding to consider that anyone actually went for it (one morally dicey aspect of the plan had the rescuers secretly sedating the kids to help ease the burden of the treacherous dive to come).  The thanklessly powerful sound design and bravura cinematographer here capturing the minutia of this mission are Oscar caliber.  Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's lens impressively recreates the shockingly enclosed and water drenched environments presented here (you really feel like you're there with the divers) and sound designer Michael Fentum captures the haunting sonic landscape of what the rescue team experiences during their perilous dives.  On pure environmental verisimilitude levels, THIRTEEN LIVES is as chillingly immsersive of a movie experience as I've had as of late. 

Alas, I have to again ask, why didn't Howard's film...move me?  I think some of the key missteps here include the preponderance of focus on the film's technical foundation, which leaves the actors and real life characters that they inhabit getting drowned out in the process.  For a film already so bloody long, it's a large letdown to see how very little character development is presented here.  Obviously, there are countless personalities that have to be introduced on screen, but the focal point characters played by Edgerton, Mortensen and Farrell are not as fully fleshed out as they should have been.  The actors are dependably good in their roles (which apparently required them to become SCUBA certified, which is something I can respect), but there's not much lurking beneath the surface with these brave men.  To Howard's credit, he tries to sway focus away from these white heroes and towards the countless other Thai officials that helped in the cause, whether it be in Thai Navy SEALS or local farmers that are willing to destroy their crops and livelihoods if it means getting billions of liters of water out of the caves and saving the boys.  All in all, though, all of these players - regardless of nationality - are pretty paper thin and not memorable characters.  They're essentially rendered as props to help support the overall visceral experience of the film...and not much more.