The Crane Pool Forum

A dozen young Thai boys and their soccer coach explore a cave, getting trapped miles in by rising waters when a sudden monsoon strikes a month early. Two British cave divers, mostly skilled in recovering dead bodies, join an international team desperate to get the trapped spelunkers out before the cave floods completely.

Reminds me of 33 - the movie about the 33 miners trapped in a mine in Chile that came out a few years ago.
That one interested me because it was co-produced by Chile-born actress Cote de Pablo.

Later

Ziva :)

My first thought about this movie is to wonder whether there's enough of a story in the incident to justify a feature length film.

That's not an entirely unfair thought. That you can still give an audience thrills and suspense with a true-story adventure movie we already was proven by Ron Howard himself with Apollo 13, and subsequently by Ben Affleck with Argo, but that guarantees nothing.

And indeed Howard isn't seemingly going for thrills here, instead building a tone that is more like a police procedural, where the viewer satisfaction, I guess, is the reassurance that competent people are in charge and things therefore should work out.

I don't watch those shows, and in fact, nothing about my experience of the world in recent times tells me that this is a particularly healthy worldview. And if even scratching just a little below the surface of what Howard is presenting here tells me a story beneath the story that Howard seems to not want to frame — the organization around the rescue effort seems like a clusterfuck. The governor of the region is federally appointed, and he's supposed to be transferred out of the position that week, but he's left in charge so the government has an easy fall-guy. Thai SEAL divers butt up against the foreign volunteers as a point of pride, and the most experienced volunteer is kinda pissed when he finds the kids alive, because he thought he was called in to recover corpses.

It's odd, because the world remembers Viggo as the very soul of resolution from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, keeping heart even when Legolas and Gandalf waver, but he's the embodiment of doom and gloom here, basically sucking morale out of everybody he encounters, and the audience too, for my part.

When they arrive at a plan, the guys pitching it have no confidence it will work, the governor shrugs, having no better ideas, the SEALS are all, whatever, and the rescue begins, with everybody assuming that even partial success would be a victory.

It has the scale of a feature film, but the content mostly suggests made-for-TV fare (only twice as long), and tone is little more than a re-enactment for an educational film. They don't even subtitle most of Thai dialogue.

The real story, to me is that the effort was actually three concurrent efforts that had little or no contact depicted in the film. The first is the divers, the main heroes of the film, but the second are engineers and local volunteers who go up on the mountain above the cave to rechannel all the constant rainwater that has been pouring into sinkholes and flooding the caverns below.

Lastly come the team of water engineers pumping the caverns out, who don't get any play at all. Their only mention is when someone dismisses how futile their work is because that cave floods completely every year during monsoon season. But they and the workers above the mountain are the ones who bought the rescue divers the time they needed. And the divers seemed to need every second of it.

I'm not sure what I missed. Ron Howard is a hit-and-miss director with me, but I usually think of him as a pro. Either he just mailed this one in, or I'm just a robot, which I guess is possible.