What a breath of fresh air The Rescue is.
An honest, unblinking documentary about the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue in Thailand can’t help but be uplifting, but there’s a subtlety and understated beauty to Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s film all too rare in documentaries today.
First of all, The Rescue is remarkable for what Vasarhelyi and Chin, 2019 Academy Award winners for the climbing film Free Solo, chose to leave out, as much as what they chose to include.
There’s no bullying, hectoring narration, for starters.
The cave divers, the rescued children — the Tham Luang cave rescue involved the hair-raising, life-and-death rescue of a dozen 11- to 16-year-old juvenile rep soccer players and their 25-year-old assistant coach — first responders, rescue teams and panic-stricken parents at the heart of The Rescue are allowed to tell their own stories, in their own voices, in their own way, in their own languages. It is a harrowing tale, too, as the children, and they are children, remain trapped for days in an underwater cave threatened by heavy rains and a series of catastrophic underground floods that block their way out and threaten their very lives.
The Rescue uses subtitles — no bad dubbing here — rather than relying on shouty actors’ voices to holler their way through the often noisy, obvious voice-over of so many “foreign” films. The music, by composer and Critics’ Choice nominee Daniel Pemberton, is nuanced and understated, and avoid the usual clichés of loud, so called “wall-to-wall” music, that awful ‘You’re-too-dumb-to-get-it-on-your-own’ noise common to so many documentaries.
Listening to UK rescue divers John Volanthen and Richard Stanton talk about “an underwater wrestling match” and the dawning realization that divers needed to work fast — dangerously fast — in increasingly hairy conditions before the next wave of monsoon rains hit wiped out the few underground air pockets that remained.
“We were talking about a group of children we didn’t think was possible for us to dive them out. Even if they are still alive, it can’t be done. So, now what? What the hell are we going to do now?”
As people on the outside — us, in other words —now know, they found a way.
The Rescue shows how modern-day technology, coupled with local beliefs and the capriciousness of fate — good and bad — can create a miracle, even where none is expected, and even as armchair experts predict the worst.
“Wish us luck in bringing the boys back home,” a rescue worker says, early in the film, but hardly anyone in the outside world looking on from afar believes it. A US military team, flown in from Japan, expect to find a rank rabble of amateurs in flip-flops when they arrive; instead, a US military team leader later admits, they find hard-ass professionals who are hardcore about what they do.
Why dive into underwater caves in the first place?
“It’s like being in space,” a diver explains. “Probably the purest adventure you can have.”
What makes someone want to be an explorer?
“I think it’s two parts ego,” another diver replies, “one part curiosity, one part” — he pauses, searching for the right words — “lack of confidence in yourself and the need to prove yourself.”
The Rescue is poignant, profound and well-worth the effort to find. It’s top class, to the very end.
— Disney+