"Thirteen Lives" is a recent release on Amazon Prime, directed by Ron Howard ("Hillbilly Elegy," 2020), recounting the real-life rescue of 12 boys and their soccer coach in 2018 who became trapped in a cave in northern Thailand when it flooded from unexpected monsoons. This film is a dramatization of the story with Viggo Mortensen ("Green Book," 2018) and Colin Farrell ("The Batman," 2022) in the leading roles playing two British cave divers who conduct rescues as volunteers.
"Thirteen Lives" calmly and patiently addresses the amazing complexities of this rescue and the unlikely possibility of survival. Many different people were involved in the rescue from local farmers to Thai Navy Seals and scuba divers to water engineers. The Thai boys were trapped together in the cave for 10 days before divers met them, then another six days passed before divers finished removing the boys out of the cave one by one.
All this information is arranged gently without gratuitous dialogue, and the film remains interesting at almost 2.5 hours long. Films like this can easily lean into overemotional, saccharine melodrama to heighten the true story angle, but "Thirteen Lives" doesn't do that. It remains focused on relaying as much detail as possible, and as much honesty as possible, without any emotional gravitas that feels histrionic.
Even just the logistics of the film feel miraculous. The incredibly constructed underwater cave sets and murky point-of-view camera work create a stunning claustrophobic naturalism that highlights a perilous path of cramped tunnels, spiky stalactites, falling rocks and sharp corners.
Including simple digital maps of the cave throughout the film to help illustrate its depth and challenging geography might be heavy-handed to some viewers. But I think it's a helpful efficient way to visualize the scale of this rescue and the amount of work required by the team of cave divers. It took the divers over six hours of carefully moving through the cave, mostly underwater, to reach the boys' location over 1.5 miles from the cave's entrance. It's detail like that which make this feat feel even more impossible.
"Thirteen Lives" is a feel-good inspirational film that doesn't feel forced and doesn't feel like a platform for any celebrity or physical prowess. (I'm looking at you, Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham.)
If a run-time of nearly 2.5 hours is too long for you, the 2021 documentary film "The Rescue" explores the same miraculous story in a shorter time frame.