Thirteen Lives Full Movie Free

[Livia Dossantos]

Iwas vaguely aware of some kids being trapped in a cave in Thailand at that time and I certainly wished them well, but it was not until later that I realized just how scary and desperate things had gotten for the junior soccer team in question.

Luckily for me, filmmakers, documentarians, and authors never let a good story go to waste, so just a few years later I would learn all about the struggle, heroism, and fear involved via Thirteen Lives, a tightly scripted, finely crafted film that will undoubtedly be the authority on the event for years to come.

The second movie by director Ron Howard about a real-life event where a large amount of people go to great lengths to save a small group of people with the number thirteen in the title, Thirteen Lives owes a lot to its director and cinematographer, as cool shots and harrowingly claustrophobic moments abound.

The film, which mostly focuses on the British cave divers John Volanthen (played by Colin Farrell) and Rick Stanton (played by Viggo Mortensen), is surprisingly accurate, as Stanton himself was hired as a consultant and has said that the only unrealistic thing about the movie is the clarity of the cave water, which is, of course, a necessary change.

Thirteen Lives is also fairly thorough in its recapturing, but rarely drags despite its 180-minute runtime. Things move along at a fine pace, keeping the audience engaged as the depicted days flash by and the anxiety mounts.

One of the things I wish this movie would have done is spent more time with said children. We mostly see their struggles through the lens of their saviors, rarely dwelling on the fear and struggles they went through in the dark by themselves.

The aforementioned good pacing also stumbles a bit near the end, which is overlong and could have definitely been streamlined to reduce viewer fatigue. But overall Thirteen Lives is the definitive retelling of a small piece of natural disaster history that just may make you never want to step foot in a cave again.

Howard capably reveals the rescue mission as the pieces come together: The pumps flushing water out of the cave, the forest sinkholes adding to the flood, the physicians and Thai military on the scene, and, finally, Stanton and Volanthen, who are among the few people in the world with the expertise to squeeze through a warren of submerged tunnels with scuba equipment. Finding the stranded soccer team is a miracle in itself, but getting them out is seemingly impossible. For that, they call on Richard Harris (Joel Edgerton), an anesthetist who reluctantly agrees to a desperate and ethically dubious plan to sedate the stranded team members, one by one, and lead them through an hours-long trip to safety.

Leave it to Ron Howard to deliver exactly what you\u2019d expect from a Ron Howard Thai cave rescue movie. It was inevitable that someone with a budget would make a feature about the extraordinary international effort to evacuate 12 boys and their soccer coach from deep within the flooded Tham Luang Nang Non cave system in northern Thailand\u2014arguably the only successful human endeavor of the 21st century. For Howard, a director looking for terra firma after the Hillbilly Elegy fiasco, the job must have seemed like a safe choice, his down-the-middle craftsmanship suited to a story that doesn\u2019t require much spin on the ball. The rescue effort is so astounding in itself, such a model of courage and ingenuity and institutional will, that no embellishment would seem to be necessary.

Thirteen Lives reveals the hidden flaws in that line of thinking. WhileHoward certainly knows how to stage this rescue mission\u2019s complex, multi-planed action, he doesn\u2019t bring a strong point of view to the material\u2013or really much of an angle at all, other than allowing a familiar inspirational true story to inspire again, which worked for him before with Apollo 13. It isn\u2019t enough to offer just a straightforward tick-tock of events, and that\u2019s not just because last year\u2019s gripping documentary The Rescue, from Free Solo directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, already got there first, with full participation from the real people involved. Howard\u2019s telling is skilled but superfluous.

One formidable problem is that the filmmakers have found no characters who can help establish a point of view or emotional ballast. The most obvious candidates would be Richard Stanton and John Volanthen, the two British cave-divers who first found the stranded soccer team four kilometers from Tham Luang\u2019s mouth and then spearheaded the audacious plan to extract them safely. But putting too much emphasis on Stanton and Volanthen would promote a White Savior narrative that\u2019s both unsavory and ignorant of the larger picture. It would be unfair to short change the heroism of Ekkaphon Chanthawong, the 25-year-old assistant coach who took care of the boys underground, or the Thai Navy SEALs who risked their lives, including one who died of asphyxiation while delivering diving cylinders to a cave chamber. And that\u2019s to say nothing of the steadfast political leadership, the desperate parents, or the massive effort to divert monsoon water from the cave.

Howard and his screenwriter, William Nicholson, who co-wrote the 2015 disaster movie Everest, choose a democratized approach, which seems fair, but also leave the film a bit rudderless. It doesn\u2019t help that Stanton (Viggo Mortensen) and Volanthen (Colin Farrell) are not particularly distinctive characters, other than sharing a passion for the dangerous hobby of diving into narrow underwater cave systems.

Other than some private moments when Stanton, Volanthen, and Harris ruminate over the gamble they\u2019ve agreed to make\u2014if they succeed in saving one boy, for example, they will be expected to work that same miracle 12 more times\u2014there\u2019s little in Thirteen Lives that isn\u2019t a matter of public record or treated with more urgency and tension in The Rescue. Howard\u2019s version may play differently for those who haven\u2019t seen the documentary, but his capable rendering of this heavily scrutinized event isn\u2019t ambitious enough. With everyone on screen so far out on a limb, it seems like the wrong time for a director to be so risk-averse.

With respect to the range of her performances, from the sensual adventurer of Vicky Cristina Barcelona to the psychologically wounded reporter in Christine, Rebecca Hall always projects a formidable intelligence\u2014an intelligence that like Tilda Swinton\u2019s, is made all the more imposing by her height. So when she\u2019s asked to show vulnerability, it can register like a disturbing crack in the facade, because she seems so thoroughly put-together on the surface. For his first feature Resurrection, writer-director Andrew Semans fully exploits Hall\u2019s specific strengths, following Margaret (Hall), an executive at a pharmaceutical company, as she devolves from the model of have-it-all single motherhood to a broken, wraith-like shell of her former self. The transformation is so shocking, it tips what initially seems like a \u201990s-style psychological thriller into a horror film of Cronenberg-flavored madness.

Nobody sees it coming. In the first scene, Margaret is counseling an intern whose boyfriend continues to make jokes at her expense, belittling gentle requests that he stop. \u201CSadists never understand why other people don\u2019t enjoy their sadism as much as they do,\u201D Margaret says, an insight we\u2019ll later learn she gleaned from personal experience. But in these early scenes, Semans stresses her prowess in the conference room and her contented life at home, where she looks after Abbie (Grace Kaufman), a 17-year-old about to start college, and orders up casual sex with a married co-worker (Michael Esper) like a DoorDash delivery.

Then, in a single moment, it all falls apart. While attending a dull conference for work, Margaret catches a glimpse of David (Tim Roth), and reacts with raw panic, bursting out of the room and gasping for breath. David starts to turn up in other places, too, seeming something like a ghost until Margaret tells her intern a story about a man from her own past, 20 years earlier, whose cruelty was so outlandish that it\u2019s hard to know whether the tale could possibly be true. Semans encourages that ambiguity for a while, too, as Margaret\u2019s increasingly erratic behavior at work and at home contrasts with the calm David projects when we glimpse him, at first always in public spaces, making it seem like she\u2019s unhinged for no reason. It is a potent form of gaslighting, with David settling back into the power he asserted over her at a much younger age.

Starting roughly with Hall\u2019s second monologue to the intern, delivered in a self-consciously bravura seven-minute take, Resurrection unravels as precipitously as its lead character, mimicking the woman-on-the-verge lunacy of Isabelle Adjani in Andrzej Zulawski\u2019s cult favorite Possession. While Margaret\u2019s psychic breakdown doesn\u2019t veer as wildly into the supernatural, Semans pushes her to the limit and beyond, particularly with Abbie, who she\u2019s so eager to protect that she teaches her to do whiskey shots just to prevent her from leaving their apartment. Hall allows herself to go full Adjani, which contrasts well with Roth\u2019s preternatural calm, but the more Resurrection strays from real-world trauma and violence, the less effective it becomes. By abstracting Margaret\u2019s terror, Semans makes her seem progressively unidentifiable, right up to a macabre ending that completely exits the building. Then again, perhaps Semans means to suggest that certain violations cannot be overcome.

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