Biopics, more and more, travel between that peculiar line that divides the great Hollywood drama and the tabletop movie. On the one hand, they offer impressive images, always with the tagline “Based on a true story”, but on the other hand, they do not release the human drama, the unbelievable relationships and the blurred characters. ‘Thirteen Lives’, the biopic directed by Ron Howard based on the Tham Luang cave rescue four years agohas the best and the worst of this genre: it is spectacular and faithful to the facts but there are no characters or scenes, but sections of Wikipedia filmed.
Based on a real rescue
In June and July 2018, all news was focused on Thailand: twelve children and their coach had been locked in a cave and getting them out alive was going to be an impossible mission. It was not necessary to resort to Ethan Hunt: the collaboration between countries managed, in a gesture of solidarity, to get them out of that place unharmed. This story, which is the one you know, remains unchanged during the two and a half hours of ‘Thirteen Lives’a film that frontally renounces personality in exchange for spectacularity and takes reality as a more exciting base than fiction.
Richard Stanton and John Volanthen, the two submariners who help in the rescue, are not characters at all, but mere figures with the face of a well-known actor and the name of a hero. We don’t know anything about them beyond four brush strokes that know little, so it’s impossible to get excited about the acts they carry out. To give an example: in ‘Apollo 13’, another Ron Howard biopic of the same duration, the characters they had edges, they were three-dimensional, and when misfortune came you worried about themno matter that you knew the outcome beforehand.
Because yes, of course: you are not going to find a great final revelation in ‘Thirteen Lives’, like the good Wikipedia movie that is, but the classic intertitles that explain what happened next. And this refusal to innovate in the form is one of its worst sins: it cares about giving data and that this data is correct (the time it takes to reach the different cave chambers, the exact time, the name of all the world), but their job is not to make you care about anyone but because you learn that these events occurred. This tape leaves the same feeling as reading an entry in the online encyclopedia: very exhaustive, but nothing emotional. And it is a problem.
We have to invent dramas
A film like this has a very important handicap: we all know the end. And to top it, you’d have to show some impressive scenes, a human drama measured down to the last detail or a fantastic direction. But Ron Howard’s film has no interest in even trying to go further: it has impressive scenes and shots from a technical point of view but attached to a flat address and a generic hyphen They don’t help pique interest.
The production design, yes, is fantastic, especially knowing that they couldn’t shoot in the original caves because of Covid and had to make replicas of them themselves. The scenery is breathtaking, as are the underwater scenes, shot with the tension and energy that the rest of the film does not have and where he is really able to show off. The technical team is the true star of this film, and it shines with its own light.
The classic stars do not do much to convey emotion to the viewer, focused on truthfulness, more attentive to imitation than to acting. Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell and Joel Edgerton barely have a couple of moments to show off (including an ending where the drama attacks one of the characters out of nowhere), but There is no doubt that they fully capture the spirit of the project.
Like a documentary, but in fiction
Although the cave disaster happened four years ago, there are three movies based on it: this joins ‘The cave’, where many of the protagonists played themselves, and ‘The rescue’, a documentary that tells the rescue, but not the lives of the children. And it is that these have been sold to Netflix, which on September 22 will premiere ‘Thai cave rescue’, a docuseries that It will be the only one that will have the statements of the rescued kids.
‘Thirteen Lives’ is not, as we see, an original or surprising story, but neither does it provide a new point of view or is capable of escalating feelings to go something beyond the generic drama. Sadly, Ron Howard relies too much on the power of fact and underwater scenes in the belief that nothing else is necessary to excite an audience seasoned in one and a thousand biopics Similar.
Sometimes there is no need to tell anything new, or do it in an original way, but ‘Thirteen lives’ is limited to narrating the real events and letting viewers get excited about external effects that the movie itself hasn’t earned. Despite its technical spectacularity, it is a vague movie that has no interest in taking a step towards creativity, opening a new genre in the world of cinema: that of film adaptations of Wikipedia articles, as transparent as they are devoid of real human emotions.