27 September 2023

Thirteen Lives

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Reviewed by Rama Gaind.

Director: Ron Howard, United Artists Releasing/Amazon Studios.

Academy Award-winning director Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind, Frost/Nixon, Apollo 13) gives us another dramatisation of another incredible true survival story. It’s sure to become a major Oscar contender – come awards season.

Howard is steady at the helm, working from a screenplay written by William Nicholson about a live-saving mission.

Thirteen Lives tracks British diving experts Richard Stanton (played by Viggo Mortensen, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, A Dangerous Method) and John Volanthen (Colin Farrell, True Detective, The Batman), who with an international crew of divers rescued 12 boys and their soccer coach from the flooded Tham Luang cave in northern Thailand in 2018. The Wild Boars soccer team was trapped for more than two weeks before they were rescued, after all hope was lost.

In this rescue effort led by four British divers: Volanthen and Stanton were joined by Jason Mallinson (Paul Gleeson, The Thin Red Line, Rake) and Chris Jewell (Tom Bateman, Demons, Murder on the Orient Express).

Nine Australians worked with the international search and rescue team including Dr Richard Harris and Dr Craig Challen, both of whom had cave diving experience. The pair became instrumental in solving the problem of how to get the team out.

It was an intricate extraction, a perilous journey underwater. Seeing how weak the boys (aged 11 to 16) were, and the length of the swim out of the cave, the only option was for the divers to put the boys under using anesthetics and carry them through the water.
Dr Harris (played by Joel Edgerton, Zero Dark Thirty, Obi-Wan Kenobi), an anesthetist, was responsible for giving the medical all-clear for each boy and administered anaesthesia before they left the cave. Dr Challen (who is absent from Thirteen Lives), a veterinarian, helped to de-kit the boys of their diving equipment after they had made it through the first flooded section of the evacuation route, helped carry them through to the next section and prepared them for the next dive.

This was an ‘against all odds’ harrowing rescue that had a happy ending.

Thirteen Lives, filmed largely in northern Queensland due to Covid restrictions, is an engrossing story of how the impossible was achieved.

  • Thirteen Lives is streaming on Amazon Prime Video

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