Can a feature film about the Thai cave drama top the amazing 2021 documentary?

World news has its own laws. In the last century – the epoch in which the newspapers ruled – there was a (rather cynical) journalistic rule of thumb: number of deaths divided by distance. Viewed from the West, then. In short: a thousand kilometers away two dead? Not a piece in the newspaper. A thousand kilometers away two hundred dead? That comes pretty close. For example, not every mining disaster in Chile, overturned ferry in Bangladesh or bomb attack in Beirut made the world news.

Since the emergence of news channels such as CNN and social media, a new factor has been added: emotion. Using dramaturgical laws – tension building, cliffhangers, reactions – events are presented as reality soap. We can identify with that a lot better than with a cold number. Reality TV goes around the world with ease. The distance no longer matters, it becomes BREAKING NEWS.

Monsoon

An example is the saga of the Thai youth football team De Wilde Zwijnen that became trapped in the Tham Luang underground system (‘the Great Cave’) in Northern Thailand on June 23, 2018. First they had a good training with their coach Ekapol ‘Aek’ Chanthawong, who is also only 25. Because it was Chai, the smallest of the couple, a cheerful team outing followed: romp in the cave, a tourist attraction in the region.

But the monsoon fell unexpectedly early that year. In the blink of an eye, the miles of cave complex flooded, and the boys—aged 11 to 16, still kids—were trapped like rats. Their mountain bikes were neatly parked at the entrance, but it was questionable whether they would ever be picked up again.

In the pouring rain, a massive international rescue operation involving thousands of volunteers was launched. That would last no less than eighteen days and because of the tension that could be cut, camera crews from all over the world appeared at the site of the rising waters of disaster.

The entire planet lived with it. Emo TV in its purest form, which came roaring into the living room. And it was really nice that everything went wonderfully well. Soon the rescue was talked about as a symbol of hope in a troubled world. It was a pity that in the end two of the Thai divers lost their lives.

Even afterwards it remains a heroic story. This was understood by the documentary makers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, who will be working on the reconstruction for National Geographic in 2021. The Rescue made. A 107-minute documentary, awarded at many festivals and good for four stars in de Volkskrant. With the main conclusion: what else could a feature film add to this well-crafted story, as told by those involved?

We now get the answer to that question. Hollywood director Ron Howard took up the gauntlet and presents his feature film this week Thirteen Lives on Amazon Prime Video. It is hardly a surprise that he chose this subject. Ron Howard (68) chopped early in his career with this hatchet.

In 1991 he came up with the creditable back draft, an action thriller about firefighters. And a highlight of his work is Apollo 13 (1995), the dramatized version of the spaceflight that just narrowly ended in disaster. Survival in outer space. The film starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton as the doomed Apollo crew won two Oscars and is still regarded as Howard’s best piece of work among film fans.

Thanks to his reputation, Howard was able to embark on his new survival adventure Thirteen Lives once again calling on A-list actors, with Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell as the (also in reality) flown-in British frogmen Richard Stanton and John Volanthen. Joel Edgerton plays Australian diver and anesthetist Richard Harris, who found the key to the rescue with a plan as risky as it audacious. His remarkable approach: ‘Put the boys on goggles with an oxygen tube and make them unconscious for a short time with a syringe.’ This would make it easier for the divers to lead them back to the outside world through all those caverns.

Claustrophobic

Provided: you feel that Thirteen Lives made with love. It’s a claustrophobic experience for the viewer, in those cramped, flooded caves with the helpless soccer players on their underground cliff.

To keep them from panicking, coach and former Buddhist monk Aek (Teeradon Supapunpynio) taught them the techniques of meditation: ‘Close your eyes. Breathe in, breathe out’ – and it works, apparently. When the frogs make physical contact with the football team for the first time after nine days, you can say that they are doing amazingly well under the circumstances.

Meanwhile, the movie stars are not heroes, on the contrary, the entire rescue plan is tied together. Adding further tension is the fact that the mild-mannered governor Narongsak who is to supervise the operation had actually already been fired by the military authorities. Those are not nice guys: ‘Generals do not take orders from civilians’, it is said several times to the assembled rescue workers.

The havoc that the massively assembled TV crews and throngs of concerned relatives inadvertently wreak at the crash site is also well illustrated – you think back to Billy Wilder’s media satire. Ace in the Hole (1951). In interviews, Howard has emphasized that he did not want to make a rescue film according to the well-known Hollywood recipe (“white men come to do the job in a faraway foreign land”).

That also worked. In his images Howard pays attention to the local colour, the language and the role of Buddhism. But however meticulous and humane the result is, the dramatized feature film version of 2 hours 17 minutes unfortunately adds little to the documentary. The Rescue of 107 minutes. Sometimes non-fiction just can’t be beat.