Mark Reviews Movies: CAVE RESCUE

Cave Rescue, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 4, 2022

There is no protagonist or core group of ones in Cave Rescue, a dramatization of the 2018 rescue mission in Thailand, after a group of 12 boys and their soccer coach became trapped in a flooded cave. That is a theoretical strength of the movie (not to be confused with another one about the saving of those 13 lives), but it's also a practical error in judgment.

Writer/director Tom Waller attempts to convey the big picture of how many people were involved, how much work had to be done, and how many little details had to be considered over the course of more than two weeks, as people from around the world worked to find and save the confined party. As a result, his movie veers all over, attempting to show as much as possible of the number of people and organizations involved.

Some of them are clearly important to the mission. Others don't amount to much more than a quick acknowledgment, such as a few scenes within a U.S. military base in Hawaii, or are rendered redundant by the on-screen text and dialogue, such as moments of a TV reporter summing up what has happened or is about to happen. A couple are unexpected, such as a sequence that tracks a child-sized diving mask from a shop in Wales to Thailand. All of them, though, are vital in Waller's eyes, and while that certainly conveys a sense of the international size and scope of the rescue mission, it doesn't make for particularly engaging drama.

The story begins with the soccer team, as they practice on a local pitch in the Chiang Rai Province and ride their bikes to the nearby Tham Luang cave to celebrate the birthday of the one the boys. Waller's use of intertitles to convey information is constant—not just in the introductory scene that establishes what happened and why. Basically, the caves are more or less closed to the public beginning in July, due to the annual monsoon season, but unbeknownst to the boys and their coach, the rains would come early in 2018.

Waller's approach to the ensuing search-and-rescue operation is a mixture of drama, with actors re-creating key roles and incidents of various levels of interest throughout the movie, and pseudo-documentary, with filming partially taking place at the real cave (as well as other caves and on sets) and a handful of some real people involved in the mission playing themselves. It's intriguing how much the post-rescue interest in this story must have affected Waller's narrative. For as much as we see of the scope of the mission, the story of the trapped boys and their coach is offered up in only a few scenes, and one has to assume that's mainly because it's not a tale that Waller is legally able to tell.

The same goes for the British cave divers who spearheaded the actual rescue. They're named in some text and then quickly dismissed within the story, while the end credits simply list them as "British cave divers."

The real people here include Jim Warny, the Irish cave diver who participated in the rescue and who's obviously Waller's biggest acquisition for the authenticity of his re-creation, and Napadol Niyomka (aka Pooyai Tan), a manufacturer of water pumps who sets out to find the super-powered ones his company sold and get them to that cave. Both of those men, as well as a couple other participants, play themselves, doing what they did during those two weeks. Niyomka's part of the story shows how the bureaucratic systems and governmental concerns for the lives of foreigners in their country almost derailed the best chances those 13 people had.

Meanwhile, Warny sits at home in Ireland, awaiting a call from his counterpart "British cave divers" to fly to Thailand. When he does arrive, Waller's screenplay pushes everyone and every other narrative thread to the side (including any and all depictions of rescues in which Warny was not directly involved—again, presumably, for rights issues), in order to give this real-life hero his due. The sequence reconstructing his efforts on the final day of the mission is filmed with a sense of legitimacy, of course. There's no denying, though, that the suspense here (briefly suggested by a useless flash-forward at the very start of the movie) is doubly undermined: firstly by the ubiquitous, worldwide knowledge of the outcome of this story and secondly by the movie's own internal awareness that the majority of those trapped already have made it out of the cave safely.

While that scene certainly tries—and, admittedly, fails—to convey tension, most of Cave Rescue isn't about a single person, plan, or event. Its cast is sizeable, giving us an idea of the sheer number of people who were somehow involved (The movie estimates about 10,000 in some way or form), and its scope is broad. In narrative terms, it's too big a picture, perhaps, to make us feel anything other than a vague sense of shared humanity.

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