Thirteen Lives

Thirteen Lives is the new film by Ron Howard and is being shown on Amazon Prime Video. I watched it yesterday.

Thirteen Lives, twelve boys and the coach of a Thai soccer team called the Wild Boars explore the Tham Luang cave when an unexpected rainstorm traps them in a chamber inside the mountain back in 2018. Entombed behind a maze of flooded cave tunnels, they face impossible odds. 

A team of world-class divers navigate through miles of dangerous cave networks to discover that finding the boys is only the beginning.

The divers had a tremendously difficult job to reach the trapped people and then to rescue them using techniques which had never been tried before.

Here's the trailer for the film:

Here's Ron Howard breaking down one of the scenes involving the claustrophobic cave diving - the lead actors trained as cave divers:

The cave is open again to the public.

The film is extremely well made as one would expect from Ron Howard.

A story on the film here.

A map of part of the cave system is shown repeatedly during the film to help the viewer orient themselves with its confusing geography.

The film is also very careful to try to reduce the risk of it being a 'white saviour' narrative. 

Howard’s film meticulously shows that the rescue effort involved more than 10,000 people, mostly Thai, but with volunteers flying in from around the world to offer their skills.

There is the water expert who coordinates an effort to stop water going into sinkholes at the top of the mountain, which would fill it up faster than it could be pumped out at the bottom. A useful geographical plot point once again.

A water engineer called Thanet Natisri was galvanising local people to help him fill in sinkholes that are flooding the cave network in order to give the rescue mission more time. Howard shows the volunteers who fill in these holes and line the hillside with pipes, some made from bamboo, to divert the water. These scenes echo the Werner Herzog epic Fitzcarraldo, with its human battle against torrential elements, but the twist is that this battle is being fought, not by a vainglorious individual but by a selfless band of locals.

He also mentions the fact that some of the boys were stateless being Shan, who live on the border between Thailand and Myanmar.

Here's a Fact vs Fiction piece.

The film ends with tributes to the two Thai divers who died: one during, and one after the rescue.

It's an excellent film and a recommended watch, and worthy of further discussion.

Cross posting from the Geography in/on Film blog.