‘The Rescue’ Review: A Deep Dive Into Courage

[peekaboo]

The story of the operation to save a Thai soccer team gets the documentary treatment in Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s gripping film

Claustrophobes beware, but even you may find “The Rescue” enthralling. It’s a National Geographic documentary, playing in theaters, about the international effort, organized at a feverish pace in June 2018, to rescue 12 boys and their soccer coach trapped in a flooded cave in northern Thailand. The directors were Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. They won an Oscar in 2019 for “Free Solo,” a literal cliff-hanger of a doc about a climber ascending the sheer wall of El Capitan, the 3,200-foot monolith in Yosemite National Park, without the usual array of climbing equipment or safety gear. Their latest film chronicles the skill and unfathomable courage of divers who descended into the darkness of a labyrinthine system of caves, risking entrapment in the tightest of spaces by rapidly rising water. The stuff of heroism is always mysterious. In this case it’s also marvelously strange.

Chances are you recall the end of the story, which spanned more than two weeks and, during most of that time, figured prominently in news coverage around the world. Even so, the suspense will be almost unendurable. I wrote that about “Free Solo” and it’s no less true here, because the fate of the teenage athletes and their coach is tied to the safety of the divers. Every dive is fraught with peril, every constricted chamber in the vast subterranean maze could turn out to be a death trap. (Although a movie about confined spaces might seem a logical candidate for viewing on home screens—and though some of the diving scenes are, of necessity, re-enactments—try to see “The Rescue” in a theater before it goes to streaming. Only the big screen can do justice to the remarkable scale and complexity of the endeavor, which involved almost 5,000 Thais and more than 10,000 people altogether.)

As spectacles go, the early part of the film is a heartening one. At a time when news often means bad news and international news means yet another account of combat or suffering, it’s thrilling to see footage, astutely shaped and edited, of that global response from an ad hoc community of do-gooders with specific skills and equipment for doing good—doctors, engineers, U.S. Air Force special operations personnel, avocational divers from the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

Then practical and territorial conflicts arise. Thailand has its own skilled divers, navy SEALS who are there on the ground and ready to plunge below it at a moment’s notice. Whether the SEALS have the right skills and equipment is a matter for debate, but Thai authorities are initially adamant in their opposition to cave divers from abroad taking part in the rescue. (In fact, one former SEAL died during the rescue attempt, and a SEAL died months later of a blood infection he contracted in the course of the operation.) Watching those conflicts is disheartening in the extreme, yet they’re resolved through unexpected strategies by people who reveal their humanity in surprising ways. “The Rescue” is a model of narrative clarity—an impressive achievement, since it was made during the Covid-19 pandemic and relied extensively on Zoom interviews. More than that, though, the film is a portrait gallery of heroes who don’t seem cut out for the role, yet fit it brilliantly.

A cave diver emerges from water

Photo: National Geographic

The most endearing member of the group is Richard “Harry” Harris, an Australian anesthesiologist and, not incidentally, passionate cave diver who becomes the prime strategist of the operation once the boys are found. Finding them is a signal achievement, but getting them out is another matter, since they have no diving experience and the underwater trip to safety is long and treacherous. When others suggest sedating the boys to suppress panic, fitting them with breathing masks and floating them out, Dr. Harris resists. It’s a terrible idea, he feels. Yet it’s the only one that might work, so he devises a drug cocktail, then teaches his fellow divers how to administer it. His recollection of the process is chilling. Pushing someone’s face under water while they’re unconscious and tying their hands behind their back, he says, “felt like euthanasia to me.” 

Rick Stanton and John Volanthen in diving gear

Photo: National Geographic

The most remarkable members of the group are those cave divers from abroad, especially two middle-aged Brits—a retired firefighter, Rick Stanton, and a celebrated veteran of cave exploration named John Volanthen. We’re told that they, plus other divers they recruit from around the world, as if assembling a team for a wetsuit version of “Ocean’s Eleven,” bring skills and equipment that the Thai SEALS can’t deploy; that’s why the foreigners are finally authorized to direct and execute the rescue. I wish the film told us more about their skills, but we certainly learn a lot about their mind-sets, and these cavers are anything but the tight-jawed men of emotional steel you might expect them to be.

A diver swims through an underwater cave

Photo: National Geographic

They speak candidly, disarmingly, of having been misfits and loners as kids—bad at team sports, attracted to cave diving for the peace and quiet it offers, the sense of isolation that they perceived from the beginning as dangerous, for sure, but also comforting and safe. Who knew that wriggling through underwater crevices could be pleasurable, that floating in lightless pockets of rock could be Zen? Like all good documentaries, “The Rescue” finds the story beneath the surface of a story we thought we knew.