Fascinating but flat: Amazon Prime’s Thirteen Lives reviewed

About ten minutes in to Thirteen Lives, Boy came in and asked me whether it was any good. I said: ‘Well, it’s quite interesting, actually. I think they’ve got the actual cave divers playing themselves, so the acting is really dull and uncharismatic and a bit unconvincing but at the same time it gives the drama a sort of echt documentary feel…’

Boy, peering at screen: ‘But that’s Viggo Mortensen. You know, Aragorn from Lord of the Rings. And Colin Farrell, who you liked in In Bruges.’

Me: ‘Oh.’

What I still can’t work out is whether my gut response reflects well or badly on the finished product. If you’re making a movie about a real-life event such as the rescue of 12 boys and their football coach from a flooded cave system in Thailand in 2018, does your main duty lie with the drama or with the truth?

Director Ron Howard has opted for the latter, with mixed results. On the upside you get a balanced overview of the rescue from all perspectives – that of the trapped boys, the anguished parents, the Thai military and political authorities, the local villagers, etc. – and a detailed understanding of just how difficult the extraction operation was. On the downside, it’s too long, it’s a bit flat and linear, and you don’t really get a feel for any of the characters.

For example, the main thing we learn about dour, grimly pragmatic Rick Stanton (Mortensen) is that he doesn’t half love custard cream biscuits; and about fellow cave rescuer John Volanthen that he wears glasses, is a bit anxious and uptight, and has a son waiting at home. Oh, and there’s one who is Australian and an anaesthetist, and one who is younger, less experienced and quite nervous.

Perhaps the stupidest bit of praise I’ve read about the film is that it avoids the ‘white saviour narrative’. But when you think about it, that is the essence of the story. If it had been left up to the overcautious local bureaucracy, those boys would all have drowned. Even Thailand’s elite diving specialists, the Navy Seals, proved unequal to the task and lost one of its men (plus another, who subsequently died of blood poisoning contracted in the caves) in an accident. Instead, a near-miracle happened because a ramshackle group of grumpy middle-aged men (with a niche skill in cave rescue) – all of them inconveniently Anglo-Saxon – flew in from all corners of the world, and took a massive calculated risk which somehow paid off.

It was a risk because those boys were stuck eight hours’ arduous, mostly underwater slog from the cave entrance. The only way to get them through that deadly obstacle course of stalactites and fearsome currents was by tying up their arms and legs, sedating them, and dragging them every inch of the way, jabbing them at intervals with more ketamine, and praying that their ill-fitting scuba kit stayed on and that they kept breathing, while unconscious, through their regulators. Never had this been tried before and it was fully expected that one or two of them would die.

Famously, none of them did, which presents another problem for Howard. Everyone remembers the story because it was so involving and gripping. And the fact that we know they all made it denies the drama some of the essential moments of jeopardy that a scriptwriter would have inserted had it been pure fiction. Once you’ve got past the statutory ‘This will never work! It’s just too ambitious’ tension-creating build-up scenes, the actual mass rescue is a bit of an anti-climax because it happens pretty much without a hitch.

I don’t know what I would have done in the director’s shoes. Perhaps I would have reframed it as an Ealing-style comedy or a Dirty Dozen action caper in which a bunch of unlikely misfits save the day. Not only would it have added a bit of humour and shape to the narrative but it would have left the telling of the true story to last year’s documentary The Rescue, which I gather is more tense and exciting.

That said, the basic raw material is so strong – the beloved coach, for example, keeping those sweet, brave boys’ spirits up in the long, dark days underground by encouraging a sense of teamwork and making them do deep breathing meditation exercises – that it’s hard not to become involved in the story. And the production is very good on detail – such as the white umbrellas brandished by the Thai police to hide the unconscious boys from the media as they are stretchered out of the cave; or the network of pipes built by volunteers on the mountain on top of the cave to divert the monsoon waters from the sinkholes leading into the cave – which led to the ruination of crops in the farmland below.