The most important trick in search engine optimization, especially when you don’t expect a lot of organic traffic, is to throw “based on a true story” in the headline. It doesn’t even matter if it’s actually based on a true story because there’s always someone who wants to know. This is:
Type in almost any title and “based on a true story” and you’ll find something.
This is obviously especially true if it is actually based on a true story, even if everyone on the planet must already know that it is based on a true story. Namely: Thirteen Lives, a movie on Prime Video based on the true story of the rescue operation of 12 boys and their coach who were trapped in an underground cave in Thailand in 2018.
Yes, Thirteen Lives is based on a true story, dummy. I know it seems like decades, but 2018 was only four years ago. It was in the news every day for two weeks. If you’re wondering if Thirteen Lives is accurate to the true story, well, that’s a different question, but the answer is: Yes. Mostly. A couple of dramatic liberties were taken: the day the diver died was for one day, for example, and Joel Edgerton’s character’s father didn’t die immediately after the rescue operation, but mostly happened as as represented in the film.
Is the movie good? I mean, it’s not good. This is director Ron Howard’s wheelhouse: big-budget TV movies, like Apollo 13. Howard may not have a signature style, but he’s incredibly competent, and competent is all Thirteen Lives calls for. The story is simple. All the details are on Wikipedia. The screenplay, by William Nicholson and Don MacPherson, basically writes itself. It’s a plug-and-play situation, where Howard just needed to let the events themselves dictate the story.
That’s exactly what he does, and the names of actors he chose to play the main divers — Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell, Joel Edgerton and Tom Bateman — also do the trick: they’re not flashy roles. The actors are calm and demure, because while they know they’re playing the divers who rescued the boys, the real heroes are the kids, the coach and the 10,000 people who came together to help rescue them. They are cogs, important ones, in the machine of rescue operations, and so they are represented.
If anything, Howard is too restrained: the rescue operation takes up the last hour of the film, but there are no moments of glory that come together with crowd-pleasing music. It was one hell of an achievement: sedating 12 boys and their coach and swimming them through the three-and-a-half-hour trek through a narrow underground cave system before monsoon season arrived, but received less with encouragement and more with relief. This is precisely the story that Ron Howard conveys. It’s a solid, professional effort about professional divers directed by a professional director.
There are much better movies about fictional events and true stories that we know little about because they didn’t dominate the news headlines for two weeks less than they did five years ago, but if you’re really invested in reliving the cave rescue of Tham Luang, Thirteen Lives dutifully does the trick. I think it will be a better movie 20 years from now when the details of the actual events are still not fresh, but by God it does the job.
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Header image source: Prime Video
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