“Thirteen Lives” on Amazon Prime: The Miracle – Culture

At some point, the moment you secretly dread will come. Enter Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell, in helmets with flashlights attached and special suits needed for diving the deepest caves on earth. They look serious and don’t say much, but their coolness is palpable. Her presence carries an unmistakable message: once Aragorn and Alexander the Great come to the rescue, nothing can go wrong.

Which is a bit of a shame, because the suspense of Ron Howard’s film “Thirteen Lives” consists precisely in the fact that everything could go wrong up to the last second. It’s the drama of 12 soccer boys and their coach caught and trapped by the sudden flooding at Tham Luang Cave in northern Thailand in 2018. The world was lifeless for nine days, then the missing were discovered, emaciated but unharmed, in a nearly inaccessible cavity inside the mountain. Two military divers died trying to get them out, in the end there was round-the-clock reporting – until the miraculous rescue.

This story of perseverance and the will to survive, of global helpfulness and the team spirit of a gigantic rescue operation has already inspired many retellings: books, films, series and the great documentary “The Rescue”. In the fight for those special film rights that also brought access to the rescued and their families, veteran Ron Howard finally prevailed, who was now allowed to make the Hollywood version, as it were: a feature film with stars and a large budget, financed by MGM and Amazon Prime.

When the Hollywood label comes into play with real stories like this, you don’t expect anything good at first. Are a few of those involved being inflated back to superhuman status for a big star to want to play them while everyone else is reduced to marginal figures? Is it just a few (older, white, male) Englishmen who, as the world’s best cave divers, are doing the impossible, surrounded by hesitant Thais, rewarded with tears from grateful children’s eyes?

Well, see above: Even Ron Howard cannot escape the constraints and pitfalls of star cinema. But he does his best to at least try. Viggo Mortensen & Co. have to share the screen with a lot of actors, because everyone who was important should appear: the boys, their coach and their parents; the dutiful governor who led the operation and was already designated as a scapegoat in case of failure; the Thai Navy divers who ended up with casualties among their ranks; the engineer who tirelessly laid drainage pipes with the locals; even the farmers who voluntarily agreed to the flooding of their fields and the loss of their crops (“For the boys!”).

A big hand spit, a celebration of teamwork

In the end, that’s what William Nicholson’s amazingly factual screenplay is trying to do: bring together the most diverse perspectives, honor the diverse teams and their work. The triumph over the forces of nature of a monsoon flood turns into a great standing together and spitting on hands, across nationalities, jurisdictions and ranks. With improvisation, deliberation, hesitation and rushing forward again, with many smaller and larger acts of heroism.

Among active Hollywood filmmakers, Ron Howard is the great optimist. As in his not so dissimilar space rescue film “Apollo 13”, one senses a respect for the reality of human achievements and experiences, which cannot be adjusted in the way that suits the dramaturgically. The heartbeat moments, in which life and death are at stake, are accordingly sometimes subtle: an oxygen tank that gets fatally caught between stalactites; a guide rope slipping from a diver’s hand in murky cave water; the sound of a child breathing under a diving mask suddenly stopping…

So the film becomes a kind of history lesson about how the rescue was successful in detail, and even in retrospect one is amazed at how small the chance was that all those trapped would actually survive. The variety of the individual threads of fate, which are linked and interwoven, becomes a dramaturgical challenge: one understands why they should all have their place in “Thirteen Lives”, and yet recognizes that a lot of personal aspects of the individual characters are left behind. The film is overly long and at times seems almost breathless. The fact that it still fits into a successful drama speaks a lot for the classic storytelling craft of its makers.

A very special fly in the ointment remains only for those viewers who have seen “The Rescue” – the same story as a documentary. You get to know the two most important rescuers, the Englishmen John Volanthen and Rick Stanton, very well. They obviously don’t look like Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen who play them now. They may be the best cave divers in the world, but nobody would call them cool at first glance. You can feel how nerdy their hobby really is and how they still expect to be ridiculed for it. But it is precisely in their quirky determination that they end up being quite irresistible. A Hollywood action film that would dare to approach such main characters – that would really be something new.

Thirteen Lives, UK 2022 – Directed by Ron Howard. Book: William Nicholson. Camera: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. Music: Benjamin Wallfisch. Starring Colin Farrell, Joel Edgerton, Viggo Mortensen, Sukollawat Kanarot, Thiraphat Sajakul. Amazon Prime, streaming start: August 5, 2022