Much like the soccer team at the center of its story became trapped under millions of gallons of monsoon runoff, Thirteen Lives finds itself trapped under the weight of its own narrative.
The film is Ron Howard’s feature length, cinematic attempt to tell the harrowing true tale of the boys’ soccer team that found themselves trapped for 18 days deep within northern Thailand’s Tham Luang cave system. The early, unexpected, and sudden arrival of monsoon flooding in June 2018 confined the team within the caves’ deep recesses, and, unbelievably, an international team of rescue divers, military personnel, government officials, and thousands of civilian volunteers managed to get all 12 boys, and their coach, out alive.
Truly, it’s an incredible story, especially due to the sheer complexity of the rescue operation. Yet there’s the rub; Thirteen Lives tries to both explain the rescue’s intricacies and meaningfully introduce characters across the varied and abundant rescue team, and there’s just not enough room to effectively do both.
Rick Stanton (Viggo Mortensen)and John Volanthen (Colin Farrell), British, world-renowned rescue divers, are our ostensible heroes, and the pair of actors do an admirable job with what real estate the film gives. But there isn’t much to give because Thirteen Lives tries to include characters from all participating groups, including the Thai government, amateur international divers, local Thai farmers, the boys’ families, and the Thai Navy SEALs. Yes, all these groups are important to the real-life story, but this isn’t a New York Times article. Having that many characters in whom we’re supposed to emotionally invest within a two-hour film is just disorienting, and it leads to moments like a Thai Navy SEAL’s death midway through the rescue falling flat.
And because the film tries desperately to spread itself out among so many character moments, its explanation of the rescue’s mechanics also falls short. The actual methods through which it makes its attempt are fine, as diagrams and title cards effectively keep track of internal cave pathways and the rescue’s timing. However, there isn’t enough space to really dig into what’s happening, and much of the nitty-gritty details about the rescue end up yadda-yadda’d.
A specific example that illustrates the point is the character treatment of the boys at the story’s heart. The film opens with the boys and their coach as they fin- ish up practice and excitedly stop by the cave before heading home for one of their fellow member’s birthday party, Sponge-Bob cake and all. We see them enter the cave, but then the film doesn’t return to them, even once, for more than an hour of runtime, until Stanton and Volanthen discover them alive.
The choice’s point is to create dramatic tension as to whether the boys are still alive as the rescuers struggle to reach them, but that tension is a fallacy. This only happened a couple years ago, and the boys’ survival was the number one reason it became such an international phenomenon. Not to mention Thirteen Lives is marketed as an inspirational affair, and I highly doubt anyone who queues up the movie thinks the titular “thirteen lives” aren’t going to make it. A depiction of the boys’ mindset within their dark, desolate situation should have been a major draw, yet the film almost actively runs away from it, seemingly to keep the answers away from an audience who’s already seen the test.
The story is the story, and that, along with Howard’s signature (if bland) Hollywood polish create something that’s perfectly watchable. But it’s unwillingness to sacrifice anything whole cloth results in a very thin product that’s better told elsewhere.
This review originally appeared in the August 3, 2022, edition of the Martin City Telegraph.
