Witnessing heights of human endeavor
Documentary traces cave divers’ heroic operation to rescue Thai youths, coach
When 12 young Thai soccer players and their coach were famously rescued in July 2018 from deep inside the Tham Luang cave in Northern Thailand, where they’d been trapped underground for 18 days, the whole world rejoiced.
News cameras transmitted the footage from the muddy entrance to the cave as one ambulance after another departed, ferrying the emaciated boys to safety and medical care. Miraculously, all survived — an outcome that just days earlier had seemed impossible due to the logistical nightmare of extracting them from their location 2½ miles inside the cave and the impending monsoon rains.
Audiences get to relive that exhilarating moment, and the extraordinary multinational effort leading up to it, in the new documentary “The Rescue,” which is being shown on Monday and Tuesday, Oct. 11-12, as part of the 44th Mill Valley Film Festival. It’s a riveting portrait of extreme human accomplishment and ingenuity, showcased in a film of staggering suspense — a marvel given that we all know it has a happy ending. It’s also well worth seeing on the big screen.
“You would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved” by the successful rescue effort, one European broadcaster at the time said on air, fighting back tears. The same can be said for “The Rescue,” codirected by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. The married filmmakers won the 2019 Oscar for best documentary for “Free Solo,” their edge-of-your-seat documentary about rock climber Alex Honnold’s death-defying ascents in Yosemite.
Chin and Vasarhelyi said that working on “The Rescue” moved them deeply, but not necessarily for the reasons you’d expect.
While there’s an inherent poignancy to the story because the lives of children, ages 11 to 16, were at stake, the filmmakers were awed by the fact that a misfit cadre of volunteer, middle-aged British cave divers turned out to be the only people on Earth capable of saving the boys. No nation, including the U.S., had military special forces or SEAL teams up to the task. Instead, men like Rick Stanton and John Volanthen, ex-firefighters, IT consultants and electricians with a reputation for being the best cave divers in the world, flew to Thailand to help. They became the de facto stars of Vasarhelyi and Chin’s movie, which is fundamentally a deeply inspiring portrait of unlikely heroes doing something selfless on behalf of others.
“The story’s rather elemental,” Vasarheyli said in a joint video call with The Chronicle from her family’s home in New York. (She, Chin and their two young children split their time between New York and Wyoming.) She explained that all the British divers, as well as Australian anesthesiologist Dr. Rick Harris, who figures prominently in the film, “were volunteers who made this absolute moral decision to be their best selves.”
In a final moonshot effort that even he thought was likely to fail, Harris concocted a drug cocktail to sedate the boys — a fact not widely reported until this movie — in order
to keep them from panicking during the dive out. He had to teach the divers how to anesthetize the boys themselves with injections through their wet suits, knowing as a doctor all the risks.
“How extraordinary is that?” Vasarhelyi said. “They didn’t know these children. They weren’t getting paid. But they were the only people in the world who could try. They knew if they didn’t, everyone involved would die.
“I still get choked up about the bittersweetness of it all, because here you have a story which really shows people being their best.”
The volunteer divers had even been warned they could be jailed in Thailand if their mission failed. “They had everything to lose and chose to be selfless,” Chin said. “These guys really thought their plan was ludicrous, that it would be a miracle if they even saved one child.”
“We wanted to do justice to their courage,” Vasarhelyi added.
Back in 2018, when Vasarhelyi and Chin watched the rescue play out like everyone else on TV, they quickly started looking into the possibility of telling the story on film. They lobbied National Geographic to get the job (after director Kevin Macdonald backed out to finish “The Mauritanian”). They knew they were taking on a big challenge, though they couldn’t have foreseen just how tough it would be making a film about underground events in a foreign country using other people’s footage — all during a pandemic.
“It had every challenge possible in nonfiction,” Vasarhelyi said.
She explained it was the first time they weren’t present for a film’s principal action. Additionally, “it’s pitch-black inside a cave, the water is muddy, and there was very little footage that was understood to exist from inside the cave.”
To their surprise, in May, after their film was nearly complete, the Thai Navy SEALs delivered 87 hours they had shot of the full operation, “including footage of the children that had never been seen before.” So Chin and Vasarhelyi reworked their movie, which includes re-enactments of some crucial underwater scenes with the key divers at Pinewood Studios in the U.K.
Of all the constraints and frustrations they had to overcome to create their impressive film, Vasarhelyi said she sees those “as special. They trigger creativity and innovation. They push you to think.”
“I lived every day in fear of messing up,” she admitted, “but that’s kind of the point.”