Too good not to be true: Two movies about the Thailand cave rescue

The truth behind the 18-day effort to rescue twelve young soccer players and their coach trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand was too crazy to be reported at the time. Two films, a documentary and a drama film, tell the unbelievable story.

(Images:www.imdb.com)

Perhaps you were glued to the news in late June and early July 2018 as the world followed the ultimately successful efforts in northern Thailand to rescue the 12 young boys of a soccer team and their assistant coach from the Tham Luang Nang Non cave who had become trapped by sudden flooding. If you haven’t checked in on the story since then, though, you have no idea. As incredible as the operation seemed at the time, the truth is so audacious, so insane, that the full details of how the boys were rescued weren’t revealed until well after the mission was completed, and news reports even months afterward continued to perpetuate misleading, overly rosy accounts of the rescue.

If you don’t know what really happened, don’t Google it. The best way to learn the truth today is by watching one of two movies: the well-crafted Ron Howard drama Thirteen Lives (in theaters July 29th and on Amazon Prime August 5th) or the astonishing NatGeo documentary The Rescue (one of my top 10 films of 2021, now streaming on Disney+).

Both films are moving odes to heroism, human solidarity, and ingenuity in the face of seemingly impossible odds. It’s a feel-good story in the end, but incredibly harrowing as it unfolds. Success seems impossible even to imagine, let alone achieve: So many factors weigh against it. The long, at times excruciatingly narrow passages of the cave are so daunting, and the water currents were so strong, that even Thai Navy SEALs were at a loss. In the end, thousands of people, including local and international volunteers, local military and police, US Special Forces, and medical professionals made crucial contributions to the success of the mission—but the rescue itself was planned and carried out by a handful of British and Australian amateur cave divers whose passion for their niche sport had cultivated in them the specific skills needed for this operation. Even then, the mission would have failed had one of them not happened to have the right day job.

The Rescue: The right stuff

The Rescue is from husband-and-wife documentarians Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, whose Oscar-winning Free Solo was also about a devotee of an extreme sport, solo rock climbing without ropes or safety equipment. The Rescue is about a massive, coordinated effort both to keep the boys alive long enough to be rescued and to make their rescue possible, but it’s also about the disposition and the mindset required to make a hobby of spending hours at a time in pitch-black, labyrinthine, water-flooded recesses in the earth.

Not unlike Alex Honnold, the emotionally withdrawn subject of Free Solo, retired firefighter Richard Stanton and IT consultant John Volanthen—British diving partners who volunteer with the UK-based Cave Rescue Organisation—are natural loners. By their self-deprecating accounts, they weren’t popular in school and did not excel at team sports. Yet the physical and psychological challenges of their passion, though nerve-racking just to think about for most people, they meet with deep calm and focus. Still, at the site of the Tham Luang cave in the early days of the crisis, it’s not necessarily clear that these middle-aged, physically unremarkable-looking men have something to bring that the rugged, well-equipped Navy SEALs don’t.

As gripping as Free Solo is, The Rescue has a vastly more compelling story to tell: one with a strong moral center. One can make a case that anyone who pushes the limits of human achievement, as Honnold does, is in a way glorifying the Creator of all (regardless of their intent, though whether it’s to their merit will depend on intent). But Stanton and Volanthen’s passion, though partly driven by similar motives, is also expressly altruistic. (It’s no coincidence, I think, that Stanton was a firefighter and that another critical team member, Richard Harris, is an anesthesiologist.) Nor are their works of mercy confined to saving lives. Stanton and Volanthen have also been called on to retrieve bodies from caves—a service they reasonably feared they would be called to render in Thailand.

The Rescue attests the human impulse to turn to a higher power when even the best human expertise and efforts may not be enough. At the mouth of the cavern is a shrine where visitors pray, light candles, and burn incense before a statue of the “reclining goddess,” Jao Mae Nang Non, for whom the cave system is named. (The outline of the mountains over the cave, viewed from the right angle, may be thought to resemble the outline of a supine woman.) The arrival of a prominent Buddhist monk, Phra Khuva Boonchum, creates a stir, especially when he declares that the boys are safe and that they will soon come out of the cave. After the boys are found, Stanton is pressed to bring them red string bracelets blessed by the monk—a token that means nothing to him, but means a great deal to the boys. (We’re also told that the monk predicted that one or two people might die in the rescue. Ex-SEAL Petty Officer Saman Gunan lost his life in the cave while transporting supplies to the cave where the boys were trapped. Over a year later, another SEAL, Petty Officer Beirut Pakbara, succumbed to a blood infection contracted during the operation.)

Veteran editor Bob Eisenhardt deftly weaves among a blend of materials including interviews, location shooting, news reports, archival video (including stunning GoPro video shot by the SEALs), effective reenactment footage, and occasional computer graphics offering visual representations of the lay of the cave under the mountain landscape.

Thirteen Lives: Just the facts

Howard’s best film in ages was a documentary about disaster and hope: Rebuilding Paradise (2020), about the destruction of the town of Paradise, California, in the Camp Fire of 2018 and its aftermath. With screenwriter William Nicholson (Shadowlands), working from a story by Nicholson and Don MacPherson, Howard brings journalistic restraint to this dramatization, avoiding familiar Hollywood tropes in favor of a just-the-facts approach. In opening scenes, one young soccer player skips the cave trip because his dad is expecting his help preparing for a cookout. The fateful weight of that chance event is entirely implicit; there’s no need for later scenes returning to that boy or his family during the crisis, exploring how they feel about his narrow escape, and the film doesn’t go there.

Only when the action plunges beneath the surface does Thirteen Lives go for maximum impact, particularly sonically. The Rescue kept the diving reenactment footage lowkey, accompanying the detached commentary of its interview subjects. In Thirteen Lives, the diving sequences are intense and unnerving, the sound design a barrage of whooshing and gurgling along with grating and clanking of air tanks on rocks and such. What these sequences can’t evoke is the low visibility in the rushing, murky waters. Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) captures the crushing, claustrophobic sense of serpentine passages deep in the earth, but there’s always enough clarity and light to see by, which undermines the desperate fumbling of a diver when he loses his grip on a guide line or drops something crucial.

With Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell, and Joel Edgerton in the most prominent roles, Howard could easily have made a superhero movie if he wanted to, or—had he not actively worked to avoid it—a “white savior” story. Even more than The Rescue, Thirteen Lives focuses on the communal nature of the operation. Where the documentary notes, for example, the pivotal role of the massive engineering project aimed at draining millions of gallons of water from the cave, Thirteen Lives goes further, highlighting the efforts of an enterprising Thai water engineer (Nophand Boonyai) and the volunteers he recruits to prevent rainwater from entering the caves in the first place. (Local knowledge of the mountain is important here; local know-how also plays a role when pipes run short.) We also see the sacrifice of local farmers who allow their fields to be flooded and their crops destroyed if it could mean a chance for the boys (who aren’t even known to be alive at that point). Howard also shows us the coach (Teeradon Supapunpinyo), himself a former monk, teaching the boys meditation and breathing techniques to keep them calm and buoy their spirits.

Some critics have complained about the thinness of the characterizations, but I appreciate a fact-based film that doesn’t try to turn people in a crisis into characters in a drama. My one reservation in this regard is that Mortensen’s Stanton is so jaded that at times he seems needlessly unlikable. When Farrell’s Volanthen contacts him about the crisis in Thailand, he mumbles to himself, “I don’t even like kids.” After finding the kids, he actually seems annoyed that they’re alive, since it makes their job more difficult. And at one point he growls, “You can die in a cave if you want to—if I’m not sure I’m coming out, I’m not going in.” I’m pretty sure the real Stanton knows there are no guarantees in cave diving.

In a mostly apolitical tale of global unity and common purpose, Thirteen Lives finds a political angle worth bringing to light: The burden of the parents is seen largely through the eyes of one mother (Pattrakorn Tungsupakul) whose fears for her son Chai (Pasakorn Hoyhon) are compounded by the fact that they are refugees from Myanmar and members of the Shan ethnic minority, deemed stateless and lacking basic human rights. Her question for the regional governor (Sahajak Boonthanakit) is heartbreaking but understandable: Will her son be rescued with the other boys? The governor is also a focal point as a local leader on the brink of retirement who has been ordered to stay in office for the duration of the crisis in case a fall guy is needed. It would be unfair to say he’s over his head—the crisis is over pretty much everyone’s heads—but he rises to the occasion. (Closing titles tell us that the stateless boys, including their coach, have been granted citizenship, as have thousands of stateless residents of Thailand since then.)

* * *

I’m glad I saw both films, though The Rescue is by far the more essential, and Thirteen Lives covers a lot of the same ground. Notably, there are aspects to the story on which neither version sheds much light, from the experience of the boys over those 18 days in the cave and their families on the outside to the pressures on Thai authorities trying to manage an overwhelming situation with so many different parties weighing in, even Elon Musk touting a kid-sized submarine and crudely insulting one of the British divers. According to Richard Stanton, one dynamic underplayed by both films is the tension between the SEALs and the amateur divers. Perhaps Netflix’s upcoming six-episode “semi-documentary” series Thai Cave Rescue, scheduled for September, will address some of these lacunas.

Note: The last paragraph of this article was updated after publication. Among other changes, a reference to incorrect reports about air tanks being brought into the cave to improve the air was removed. 


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About Steven D. Greydanus 50 Articles
Steven D. Greydanus is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, a permanent deacon in the Catholic Archdiocese of Newark, and the founder of DecentFilms.com. He has degrees in media arts and religious studies. He and his wife Suzanne have seven children.

9 Comments

  1. The chances of your reading a review of these two films this detailed and subtle in any MSM are borderline zero.

  2. Thank you for sharing your very thoughtful reviews here. I don’t know if I’m brave enough to watch the films though. I’d rather face poison snakes than a cave filling up with water. It’s just a terrifying thought. Those rescuers were amazing people.

    • My wife Suz feels the same way about underwater caves, Mrscracker, but she loved The Rescue. If you brave it, I think you’ll be glad you did. You do need a Disney+ subscription to watch it, but even for someone without one I would say it’s worth the $8 to subscribe for a month, even if you only watch this one film.

      • Thank you so much for the recommendation Deacon Steven. I’ll try to put my fears aside and watch it.
        We used to live in an area that was riddled with caves and sinkholes and I remember more than one occasion when explorers had to be rescued. I’m sure not nearly as dramatic as the Thailand rescue though.

  3. Hi Steven
    To correct you on the Oxygen issue. Yes a lot of bulk oxygen arrived on site, but none (not one cylinder) was transported to the boys. That was never a plan.
    It was not the task Saman was doing, a point very clearly addressed in both films. He was attempting to transport wetsuits, again no part of any agreed plan.
    The oxygen was there to be fed through a hose but again this was a crazy idea by the SEALs that couldn’t work and was abandoned before getting the hose underwater.
    In fact no SEALs regularly made their way to the boys . The only ones who got there were the initial 7 who hastily arrived there in the aftermath of John & I finding them. They consumed so much air that only 3 could return and the remaining 4 were trapped, in the same way the boys were. After that incident none of the SEALs dived to a point past the T junction.
    I’m telling you this to limit the spread of disinformation, apart from that you have provided the only comparison review.

    • Hi Richard,

      Thanks so much for reading, and for your fact check, for which I’m most grateful.

      I try hard to verify everything I write, but unfortunately even generally reliable news sources make mistakes. In this case The Guardian reported in July 2018 that “divers have released 30 tanks of air to try to restore healthy levels”; other sources, which I assumed were later, mentioned higher numbers.

      I will work on getting the correction made.

  4. Thank you for this review, which means I can recommend these films without seeing them. I am still trying to work up the courage to read Matt Gutman’s book The Boys in the Cave, which undoubtedly helped shape the movies. My interest in the story, after the boys were out, was piqued by my brother, a US (dry!) cave rescue specialist. His take is that all the disparate pieces which came together to make the rescue even possible can only be attributed to Divine intervention.

    • Regarding divine intervention, Ellen, a striking twist included in the documentary, but omitted from the drama film:

      Just prior to the onset of the crisis, a friend of Stanton’s introduced him to a Thai nurse from the same village as the boys who happened to be visiting Coventry. When he showed her videos of his cave-diving, she was astonished: “Are you crazy?” she asked.

      Then she returned home—and learned that there were boys trapped by flooding in a cave in her backyard. Immediately after meeting one of the world’s foremost cave-diving experts! “It was too coincidental,” she says. “It gave me goosebumps!” And so Rick was called to Thailand by the nurse he had just met.

      One can definitely consider that divine Providence.

  5. The movie review article titled Too Good Not To Be True: Two Movies About the Thailand Cave Rescue by Steven D. Greydanus from The Catholic World Report talks about the drama film Thirteen Lives and the National Geographic documentary The Rescue. The subject of both films is the harrowing 18-day dive and rescue mission of 12 young boy soccer players and their assistant coach in Tham Luang Cave, Thailand back in the year 2018. Both of these movies are powerful tributes to bravery, comradery, and resourcefulness in the face of insurmountable challenges.

    The First Media Key: Balance
    In the book Infinite Bandwidth, the first step of applying Media Key #1 is praying for the virtue of temperance which “is necessary for practicing the key of balance.”(Gan, pg. 31) Practicing the virtue of temperance important because, “The temperate person directs the sensitive appetites toward what is good and maintains a healthy discretion.”(Gan, pg. 31) When looking at any form of media from all angles, its positives and negatives need to be evaluated as well as how much time is spent on it.

    The review talks about both films saying, “As incredible as the operation seemed at the time, the truth is so audacious, so insane, that the full details of how the boys were rescued weren’t revealed until well after the mission was completed, and news reports even months afterward continued to perpetuate misleading, overly rosy accounts of the rescue.”(Greydanus, 2022) The writers of these news reports have not remembered the virtue of temperance and therefore are unbalanced. The book Infinite Bandwidth states that, “Without balance, without a willingness to look at media from every possible angle, we can’t possibly form right judgements. We run the risk of bias, narrow-mindedness, and ultimately, ignorance.”(Gan, pg. 22)

    The Second Media Key: Attitude Awareness
    In the book Infinite Bandwidth, the first step of applying Media Key #2 is praying for the virtue of prudence which “disposes practical reason to discern our true good in every circumstance and to choose the right means of achieving it…”(Gan, pg. 47)

    The review talks about the documentary The Rescue saying, “One can make a case that anyone who pushes the limits of human achievement, as Honnold does, is in a way glorifying the Creator of all (regardless of their intent, though whether it’s to their merit will depend on intent). But Stanton and Volanthen’s passion, though partly driven by similar motives, is also expressly altruistic. (It’s no coincidence, I think, that Stanton was a firefighter and that another critical team member, Richard Harris, is an anesthesiologist.) Nor are their works of mercy confined to saving lives. Stanton and Volanthen have also been called on to retrieve bodies from caves—a service they reasonably feared they would be called to render in Thailand.”(Greydanus, 2022) This is a perfect example of Media Key #2 because the regular jobs of some of the team members were all connected to saving lives. Not only that but they also had experience in rescuing dead bodies from caves, which is what they had been terrified of had the boys not survived.

    The Third Media Key: The Dignity of the Human Person
    In the book Infinite Bandwidth, the first step of applying Media Key #3 is praying for the virtue of justice which “disposes one to respect the rights of each and to establish in human relationships the harmony that promotes equity with regard to persons and to the common good.”(CCC Paragraph 1807)

    The review mentions multiple critical points in the movie Thirteen Lives but one of the most notable is when the mother of one of the soccer players questions if her son will be among the survivors. “The burden of the parents is seen largely through the eyes of one mother (Pattrakorn Tungsupakul) whose fears for her son Chai (Pasakorn Hoyhon) are compounded by the fact that they are refugees from Myanmar and members of the Shan ethnic minority, deemed stateless and lacking basic human rights. Her question for the regional governor (Sahajak Boonthanakit) is heartbreaking but understandable: Will her son be rescued with the other boys?”(Greydanus, 2022) This is a perfect example of Media Key #3 because both the mother and her son were immigrants and did not have any legal citizenship papers since they were part of a minority ethnic group and therefore, they were deemed stateless. Nevertheless, the article mentions that after the rescue, the boy, the assistant coach, and two other teammates were all made legal citizens of Thailand. “Closing titles tell us that the stateless boys, including their coach, have been granted citizenship, as have thousands of stateless residents of Thailand since then.”(Greydanus, 2022)

    The Fourth Media Key: Truth-Filled
    In the book Infinite Bandwidth, the first step of applying Media Key #4 is praying for the virtue of fortitude which “enables one to conquer fear, even fear of death, and to face trials and persecutions. It disposes one even to renounce and sacrifice his life in defense of a just cause.”(CCC Paragraph 1808)

    The review talks about the documentary The Rescue saying, “After the boys are found, Stanton is pressed to bring them red string bracelets blessed by the monk—a token that means nothing to him, but means a great deal to the boys. (We’re also told that the monk predicted that one or two people might die in the rescue. Ex-SEAL Petty Officer Saman Gunan lost his life in the cave while transporting supplies to the cave where the boys were trapped. Over a year later, another SEAL, Petty Officer Beirut Pakbara, succumbed to a blood infection contracted during the operation.)”(Greydanus, 2022) This is a prime example of Media Key #4 because even after the Buddhist monk announced his prediction the two men that would lose their lives remained at their posts and in the end, sacrificed their lives for the sake of a just cause.

    The Fifth Media Key: Inspiring
    In the book Infinite Bandwidth, the first step of applying Media Key #5 is praying for the “virtue of hope to be integrated into all media.”(Gan, pg. 95)

    The review talks about the movie Thirteen Lives saying, “Howard also shows us the coach (Teeradon Supapunpinyo), himself a former monk, teaching the boys meditation and breathing techniques to keep them calm and buoy their spirits.”(Greydanus, 2022) In this scene where the assistant coach teaches the boys how to meditate, he has instilled hope into their spirits. This might also inspire the boys to start meditating whenever they have an obstacle in their path of life.

    The Sixth Media Key: Skillfully Developed
    In the book Infinite Bandwidth, the first step of applying Media Key #6 is praying for the virtue of faith; which is believing in God as Creator, Father, and the source of truth. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “…By faith ‘man freely commits his entire self to God.’ For this reason the believer seeks to know and do God’s will. ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’ Living faith ‘work[s] through charity.’ ”(CCC Paragraph 1814)

    The review talks about the movie Thirteen Lives saying, “…the pivotal role of the massive engineering project aimed at draining millions of gallons of water from the cave, Thirteen Lives goes further, highlighting the efforts of an enterprising Thai water engineer (Nophand Boonyai) and the volunteers he recruits to prevent rainwater from entering the caves in the first place. (Local knowledge of the mountain is important here; local know-how also plays a role when pipes run short.) We also see the sacrifice of local farmers who allow their fields to be flooded and their crops destroyed if it could mean a chance for the boys (who aren’t even known to be alive at that point).”(Greydanus, 2022) This is a perfect example of Media Key #6 because the article explains in the movie how everyone made an act of faith and participated in saving these boys. The water engineer did not have to use his resources to prevent another flood and the farmers did not have to volunteer their fields and sacrifice what would have been a season of rich harvest and profitable crops.

    The Seventh Media Key: Motivated by and Relevant to Experience
    In the book Infinite Bandwidth, the first step of applying Media Key #7 is praying for the “virtue of charity; which can promote sympathy for and understanding of others.”(Gan, pg. 128)

    The review talks about the documentary The Rescue saying, “Veteran editor Bob Eisenhardt deftly weaves among a blend of materials including interviews, location shooting, news reports, archival video (including stunning GoPro video shot by the SEALs), effective reenactment footage, and occasional computer graphics offering visual representations of the lay of the cave under the mountain landscape.”(Greydanus, 2022) This part of the documentary The Rescue is a perfect example for Media Key #7 because it showed the real camera footage from the cave diver’s perspective and made the spectator understand the importance of the mission.

9 Trackbacks / Pingbacks

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