Ron Howard’s “13 Lives” is an endurance feat that depicts the 18-day effort to rescue a boys’ soccer team from Tham Luang caves in Thailand in 2018, played by actors Viggo Mortensen as Rick Stanton and John I am in awe of these two unpretentious men named Volensen. And Colin Farrell plays undermagnetized until these charismatic movie stars are like blobs of air-dried saliva. His two rumpled, grey-haired Britons are not particularly heroic in appearance or demeanor. “I don’t even like kids,” says Rick — not in front of the press, thankfully.
Still, Rick and John have the physical and mental stamina to endure six hours of scuba-suited caving through narrow crevices with little visibility as fanged stalactites scrape through air tanks. One of the few cave divers. No wonder they, and William Nicholson’s script based on the story of William Nicholson and Don McPherson, have no time for nonsense. This is a practical description of a near-impossible mission. First, find the trapped boys and, even harder, swim them out.
Howard doesn’t waste his energy doubting the outcome. (The operation was a success, with two casualties.) He was fascinated by the mechanics of how the divers pulled it off. This is a feat that requires just a touch of gooshing from the clattering cymbals of composer Benjamin’s Wallfish, which plays like Thriller. Watching Rick and John’s team (expanded to include parts played by Joel Edgerton, Tom Bateman, and Paul Gleeson) swimming back and forth with the boys in tow is exhausting. Audiences spend his hour of screentime experiencing the primal horror of being underground, underwater, and—omitted in the original news report—under sedation. Meanwhile, sound his designer Michael his Fentum makes every time his helmet scrapes on a rock feel painful, expertly heightening the anguish with the panicked squeak of a cylinder low on oxygen.
It’s a race with water, flooding caves and thundering down sinkholes that kick up treacherous currents. Creates a gloom that washes away. A radio broadcast that monsoon season has hit the region ahead of schedule plays like a horror trope in which a doomed teenager hears a serial killer’s escape from prison.
The movie’s villain, as Howard suggests, is climate change. As for that hero, the real diver has already publicly rejected the role, contradicting the film’s philanthropic efforts to scale back events involving 5,000 helpers from 17 countries to a story of a white savior. To strike a balance, Howard has a local governor (Sahajak Boontanakit) forced to make risky decisions, an irrigation engineer (Gerwin Wijaja) organizing a volunteer sandbag party, and a crop sack. It contains a group of farmers led by Nongrutai Bungan Win who agreed to destroy the dangerous plans. This statement of international solidarity feels like a thesis that Howard doesn’t want to blur. Wouldn’t it be exciting if the planet worked together to prevent an environmental crisis before more lives were endangered?
Focusing on the rescuer leaves little time for the person being rescued. All we know about the boys’ struggle is that their coach (Patrakorn Tungsupakul) was a former Buddhist monk who taught them meditation to overcome their fears. Naturally, the child begins to expect Zen practices to be woven into the plot to help him wake up and settle in the water. Instead, it’s unclear whether Howard left the point as a hanging fact, or as a hint that the children deserve more credit for their own survival.
thirteen lives
Rated PG-13 for vulgar language and creepy imagery. Running time: 2 hours 27 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime.
