Rating: PG-13 | Runtime: 147 minutes
Release Date: July 29th, 2022 (USA)
Studio: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) / United Artists Releasing
Director(s): Ron Howard
Writer(s): William Nicholson / Don MacPherson and William Nicholson (story)

You have to be a bit nuts.

Some people just can’t watch documentaries. I get it. They need a more familiar narrative structure with obvious characters working towards a common goal rather than the often disparate threads taken by documentarians trying to do justice to the numerous moving parts.

So, while Ron Howard’s Thirteen Lives will always be completely unnecessary since Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s The Rescue already supplied a definitive account of what occurred during the harrowing rescue of a young Thai soccer team and their coach from a Northern Thailand cave during an early monsoon season, I can’t deny its success. The fictionalization does the story justice, honors the heroes who risked their lives, and provides the sort of tense drama audiences can invest in.

I don’t say it’s unnecessary solely because the doc came first either. I say it because The Rescue utilizes its own re-enactments to approximate what occurred. And because most of the divers in those sequences were the ones who saved those boys’ lives, we’re able to see everything unfold as close to reality as possible. Watching Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen pop out of the water every now and then after a couple close-ups of potential danger simply cannot compare.

Would I say the same if Thirteen Lives was my introduction to the event? Probably not. I wouldn’t know any better. That’s where the appeal ultimately lies. Howard and screenwriter William Nicholson weren’t tasked with creating a film for a world that knows what happened. They were hired to entertain and educate one that doesn’t.

Give them credit too because they don’t go overboard on the melodrama to achieve that goal. It helps when one of your two leads (Farrell and Mortensen fill that role despite much of the film being in Thai with a majority Thai cast) is an unabashed curmudgeon with zero bedside manner.

This is a fact-based account that holds true to everything I remember from the documentary, so it’s not playing with the details as much as manipulating the emotions to adhere to more conventional narrative beats. The craft is excellent and acting top-notch. We move from the caves to the “war room” to a mountain of volunteers diverting rain to help keep the cave as dry as possible, witnessing humanity at its most empathetic and selfless. It would be almost impossible not to do story justice.

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A scene from THIRTEEN LIVES. Credit: Vince Valitutti. © 2022 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. All Rights Reserved.