In 2018, a soccer team and their coach went exploring one afternoon in the Tham Luang Nang Non cave in northern Thailand.  When a rainstorm formed over the region, flooding the cave, and trapping the twelve boys and their coach, the story gained global attention.  Assisting the Thai Navy in the rescue efforts were British divers John Volanthen (Colin Farrell) and Rick Stanton (Viggo Mortensen), who were able to locate the boys trapped deep in the cave and helped to formulate a plan to bring them all back alive.  Time, however, was not on their side as the monsoon season was quickly approaching, and public interest in the operation was growing hungry for answers with each passing hour. 

Thirteen Lives is a docu-drama recounting the incredible story of the rescue.  Directed by Ron Howard from a script by William Nicholson, the pair seeks to distill the eighteen-day ordeal involving more than 10,000 people from countries across the world, into a 147-minute drama for Amazon Prime.  It splits its time in three different storylines: the divers outside of the cave, the dive, and the massive volunteer effort from the local community who put their lives on pause to do whatever they can to bring the boys back to safety. 

The film has an incredibly still tone to it, even in sequences of high tension, Howard, and Sayombhu Mukdeeprom who operates the camera, do not shake the frame to add any artificiality to the scene.  It’s the mark of a mature filmmaker to have such trust in the script, albeit aided by the facts of the mission, to let the natural tension, excitement, fear, and triumph of the story shine through.  It is also a relief to not have to endure shaky cam for the duration of the film, too. For as much as the film relies on the facts of the case, there is still a lot left unsaid about it.  Narratively, Nicholson weaves a compelling drama, but there are apparent gaps in the fabric of the story, such as the almost namelessness of the boys, the work of the Thai Navy, and the edging out of the local efforts to divert the water from the cave.  It does not totally erase them, but a little more balance in the script could have led to a stronger connection between the audience at home with the boys and the community, and therefore, a stronger film. 

Its almost total lack of focus on the boys is the hardest narrative decision to grapple with because it places the onus of our connection with the film directly on our compassion for the children which it never really allows us to bond.  While only the most heartless among the audience would not find compassion for the stranded teens and their young coach, Thirteen Lives has very little focus on the lives in the title.  Even if the decision was made to focus more on the diving effort out of a respect for the harrowing situation the boys had to endure, there could – and arguably, should – have been a stronger focus on them, even if just through the eyes of their families on the outside. One boy was the smallest of the group, it was another one’s birthday, but that is about all of the information we have as the film does very little in way of character work. 

What we get instead is the building of a plan by John and Rick, and even that sequence is lacking of the pop and excitement of any heist film where they get the team together and run through the game plan.  Thirteen Lives glosses over that aspect of the story, and again the choice may have been made out of respect for the youth to not sensationalize their lives, but if that was the case then why even turn the story into a narrative feature in the first place?  It does not present enough facts and detailed accounts for a documentary – though it should be noted here that Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi have beaten Howard to the punch with National Geographic’s The Rescue (2021) – rather, Thirteen Lives keeps its subjects at arm’s length, so the characters never really become fully realized.  The film can get away with this because not only is it based on true events, and recent events at that, but by skirting this responsibility of the script, it does a disservice to the final cut as presented. 

The composition of the characters – and it always feels so strange to refer to characters in a biopic as such – are very thinly written.  Nicholson again relies on the general, predisposed knowledge of their heroism to do the heavy lifting and does not spend much time working on building their profiles in the narrative.  He creates a little bit of intrigue by having Rick take on a more pessimistic, or rather realistic, tone, but that is about as deep as the character building goes.  Because of the thin characterization, Farrell and Mortensen deliver rather stated performances that fall in line with the aforementioned stillness of the film.  It is understandable that the film does not wish to sensationalize the terror the boys and their families had to endure just a few years ago, but that cautious approach leads to a film without much meat on its bones and actors without much guidance on the page to create an engaging character to lead us through the narrow, flooded passages of the cave.  It does, smartly, split the screen time between the team, even when it expands to include Harry Harris (Joel Edgerton), Chris Jewell (Tom Bateman), and Jason Mallinson (Paul Gleeson), so that we are never lost as to who is who as is often the case with films that find groups stranded in the wilderness.  Granted, Thirteen Lives is a bit of an inverse of those sorts of films, think Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor (2013), but the ensemble management for the team on the outside is handled very well.  

Thirteen Lives is very handsomely made, almost to its own detriment.  It plays a little too cautiously to really be an engaging film, and meanders along when we are outside of the cave in an unfocused way that does not help to build any structure to the film other than the mere passing of time indicated by title cards.  To its credit, it does not totally wave off the reliance on faith and spirituality of the Thai people, and it seeks to also give credit to the local farmers who sacrificed their crops so that water could be diverted from the mountains.  To ignore these grassroots efforts would be totally egregious, but the focus of the film is much more on the British diving team.  The filmmakers are careful not to let this story of incredible solidarity devolve into a white savior narrative, but they also seem afraid to be able to engage with the story on a level that would take it beyond just a compilation of headlines covering the story. It is not a bad film, and many of the creative choices made are trackable decisions, but when all is said and done it can not shake this feeling of an empty effort.