Thirteen Lives Movie Review: The Claustrophobic Underwater Reality! Gets Almost Everything Right

Stars: Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell, Joel Edgerton

Director: Ron Howard

Streaming Platform: Amazon Prime Video

Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4/5 (four stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

Ron Howard returns to directing with Thirteen lives a film about a real event. Shooting the Tham Luang cave incident in 2018, the director uses an exceptional multicultural cast (Colin Farrell, Viggo Mortensen, Weir Sukollawat Kanarot) to document a true and incredible story. The feature will be available on Prime Video starting August 5, 2022. The plot about the underwater rescue in a cave in Thailand stars Colin Farrell, Viggo Mortensen and Joel Edgerton, among others. Ron Howard returns to the cinematic drama with Thirteen Lives, a story based on the true epic in which volunteer divers braved the rescue of twelve children and one adult in the Thai cave of Tham Luang.

Tragedy swept the world back in 2018 when news broke that a children’s soccer team and its coach had disappeared inside the cave in an intense storm foreshadowing the Thai monsoon. Amazon fully immerses itself in the “based on real events” label and does so with a cast led by Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell accompanied by Joel Edgerton, Tom Batema and Lewis Fitzgerald, among others. Howard continues betting on that filia that has developed in recent years: true stories. Those who have a heart because they touched us all. We saw it with Rush, but also with his recent involvement in documentaries like Feeding the World.

Thirteen Lives Movie Review: The Story

It is June 23, 2018, when in Thailand a team of teenage soccer players and their coach ventured into the Tham Luang cave to “celebrate” the birthday of a team member. Once inside, the twelve kids and the 25-year-old coach are surprised by torrential rain blocking the way out. Although it is not yet the monsoon season, the atmospheric event is powerful. After the alarm raised by a mother for the disappearance of her son, a colossal operation starts to try to get the group out of the cave. The event is followed by the media from all over the world and people from all over the globe come to help in the enterprise. After a good eighteen days, all thirteen souls are saved. The credit goes mainly to two English rescuers, John Volanthen and Richard Stanton, amateur divers who concoct a morally questionable but effective plan to get the boys out.

Over the days, up to 5,000 volunteers from around the world traveled there to collaborate after the news reached the media, highlighting the names of our great protagonists: Rick Stanton (Viggo Mortensen), John Volanthen (Colin Farrell) and Harry Harris (Joel Edgerton). The pair of Stanton and Volanthen had been exploring submerged caves for more than 30 years, so they far surpassed any authority in the area in experience. And that’s what the chemistry between Mortensen and Farrell shows in Thirteen Lives. His work is essential to enhance the biopic format with which Ron Howard demonstrates that he is once again in directing shape. A story that depends on emotions; those that his characters represent in goodness and closeness with the interpretive intelligence of both.

Thirteen lives Movie Review and Analysis

Thirteen lives get almost everything right: the scenarios have followed the graphic documentation of the real story to the letter, the director manages to convey both the anguish of the parents and that of their rescuers, and, probably, it will be reason enough for us not to feel like it. get into tight spots in the weeks after its viewing. The story progresses as a documentary would. Slow rhythm, cooking despair in the silences and measuring each dialogue with the taste of a goldsmith.

His action depends on claustrophobia, on the discovery of a new corner overshadowed by darkness. And it manages to be fascinating, making us hear the heartbeat of our characters with each drop in rhythm. The film maintains a surprising aura of mysticism for its more than 140 minutes of footage, turning the monsoon weather, the cave and the oxygen into characters in their own right. The same goes for religion. There is a timid approach in minutes, but faithful in respect for the faith in Buddhism in Thailand and its meaning for the families of the original story.

Ron Howard has taken the pulse of these kinds of stories. Without abusing the soundtrack to exaggerate the claustrophobia of diving through a forest of stalagmites, he manages to make us suffer in each internship with the divers. And he won’t do it once, twice, or three times. With new fears and new protagonists, she manages to turn each trip through underwater hell into a leap into the void. Darkness and oxygen play a fundamental role that makes us more than aware of the imminent horror that awaits anyone who dares to embark on the journey. That determination is, however, the great motive of the film.

Thirteen lives is a drama that fulfills everything that a tape with the label of reality can promise us. With an intelligent simplicity, it manages to envelop us in a latent tension, but nothing strident and always sober. It is not a great narrative display, nor is it technical. It is not the hit that we will recommend to our friends. Nor the launch that will sell subscriptions to the platform. But it is that type of cinema that is written to the beat of the heart.

Watching Thirteen Lives, you get passionate about the story scene after scene. However, the focus is very much on rescuers, politicians and the media and leaves very little space for those missing in the cave and their families. The group is seen for too little on the scene and there is very little news about the kids. How did they survive eleven days without food? In what condition – physical and mental – are they? Even without fictionalizing the narrative too much, in almost two and a half hours of film, it was necessary to leave a little more space for those who, after all, were the engine of the action.

Also on a visual level, there is the perception that a logical thread is missing, a link between the various settings of Thirteen Lives. Although maps and explanatory writings often appear on the screen, the trafficking and plan of the divers are clear only to a few. Maybe Ron Howard chose to tell his film from the external point of view of the parents of the boys, or from that of a viewer who followed the event on the news, but a pinch of additional explanation would not have hurt. After all, we are still watching a film that, however faithful to reality it wants to be, was born as entertainment.

Thirteen Lives Movie Review: The Last Words

Thirteen lives is true to the idea that represents its original story: heart, sacrifice, and courage, but also agony, claustrophobia, and despair; all this is handled with sobriety that Ron Howard makes fascinating in a display of cinematographic intelligence. His commitment to the times, the silences and the dialogues, with a brilliant performance by Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell.