In Thirteen Lives, the adaptation of a true-life crisis involving a youth soccer team trapped inside a flooding cave for 18 days, the villain is a natural climatic phenomenon people in Karachi now know well enough: unrelenting rain.

Based on a harrowing — and in hindsight awesome — rescue, Thirteen Lives is a nail-biting thriller that wastes no frames of its nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time. Although technically a white saviour story — the two divers capable of pulling off the near-impossible rescue are Britishers Rick Stanton and John Volanthen (played by Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell) — the screenplay by William Nicholson (Gladiator, Unbroken, Les Misérables) takes a good while setting up the locals and the locales.

Set entirely in Thailand, for the first 15 or so minutes, the film trumps Hollywood tradition by not introducing the white heroes at all. We are, instead, familiarised to the all-boys soccer team and their young coach as they trek deep into the Tham Luang cave, a famous tourist site that is embedded into a gargantuan forest-covered mountain. The mountain is not safe, especially for youngsters, and the monsoon season only escalates the danger.

Director Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind, Frost/Nixon) mostly steers away from local politics — with over 5,000 volunteers from 17 countries coming to aid the rescue operation, this is, after all, a film about humanity coming together — but the plot still does not present a shallow, one-sided view of the country.

Director Ron Howard treats Thirteen Lives as a mystery, a thriller and a tale of overcoming impossible odds, without the predictable cliches

The coach and one family in particular, we learn, are refugees who aren’t considered Thai citizens; in one scene, the mother of a child named Chai (one of the younger kids in the cave) meets the local governor head-on, because she feels that the child could possibly be subject to persecution by being the last to be rescued…if he is rescued at all.

Howard has always been a sensitive director who prefers emphasising human emotions within overarching, ever-present ambiences of terror (a great example in his filmography is the Mel Gibson-starrer Ransom). Despite his proclivity with this story in particular, one misses Howards’ usual, immediately recognisable, visual touch. These are not his frames, nor his customary way of unfolding the narrative or mixing of genres.

Howard treats Thirteen Lives as a mystery, a thriller and a tale of overcoming impossible odds, without the predictable cliches — perhaps because the case is recent and is well-documented (the incident took place during 2018’s soccer World Cup).

Even with the facts at hand, there is no denying the handiwork of a well-written screenplay here. The first act of the story keeps the audience in the dark on whether the children are alive and not. The second act is a thriller, because the one-way perilous journey takes an excruciating seven hours to swim. And the third act considers the consequences of the decision to sedate the children on the way back (to put it into perspective, even trained Navy Seals cannot make the journey without casualties).

The probability of a successful rescue is already too low according to John and Rick, who have the skill set and some experience in cave rescues. With depleting oxygen levels, and the swim becoming too dangerous for even the professionals, Rick and John bring in three others in a desperate play late in the story (Joel Edgerton, Tom Bateman and Paul Gleeson are added to the story at this point).

However, Howard and Nicholson shy away from painting the rescuers as shining knights who can pull off miracles. Both Rick and John are averse to media attention, shying away from press mics and photographers, and taken aback when locals present them with blessed trinkets from monks. Others are given their own bits of character development during the course of the action (the story, like any well-written screenplay, hardly wastes scenes with exposition).

For all intents and purposes, these men are common folk who, despite their bravery and heroics, aren’t glorified in the typical Hollywood way. They are but a part of a bigger operation (for example: a side-story involves an engineer from Bangkok who has been helping cover-up holes at the top of the mountain that have been flooding the caves from above).

At a time when cinema is overcome with super heroics and would-be blockbusters, Thirteen Lives turns out to be a delightful change of pace. As a streaming-only release, the film carries a triumphant feeling of liberation — perhaps because of a lack of studio oversight (one can see that Howard has free reign on how to handle the narrative), or perhaps because the film tells a heartwarming tale of succeeding against incredible odds.

Released by MGM and Amazon Studios, Thirteen Lives is streaming on Amazon Prime and is rated PG-13

Published in Dawn, ICON, August 21st, 2022