Thirteen Lives
Short description
Thirteen Lives recounts the 2018 rescue of a boys' soccer team and their coach from Thailand's Tham Luang cave system. When monsoon rains flood the tunnels during the team's visit, the group becomes trapped deep inside the mountain, cut off from the surface. As water levels rise and the boys wait in darkness with little food, an international effort takes shape outside: Thai authorities, military personnel, volunteers and cave divers converge on TMDB. The divers must navigate submerged passages to locate the group, and the discovery that the boys are still alive only deepens the challenge of bringing them out.
Ron Howard directed the film, the twenty-eighth of thirty-two features in his directing career, following Hillbilly Elegy and preceding Jim Henson Idea Man. William Nicholson wrote the screenplay, and Brian Grazer, Howard and Karen Lunder produced. Viggo Mortensen plays Rick Stanton, Colin Farrell plays John Volanthen, and Joel Edgerton plays Harry Harris. Tom Bateman, Paul Gleeson and Teeradon Supapunpinyo round out the main cast, with 63 credited cast members and 75 credited crew.
Made on a budget of 55 million US dollars, the film drew strong audience approval: a 7.8 rating on IMDb from around 78,000 votes and the same 7.8 on TMDB from roughly 1,600 votes. Its critics' rating stands at 7.3 from 184 reviews, slightly below the audience scores, indicating solid but somewhat more measured professional response.
What's left behind the scenes
- Preparing for the role, Colin Farrell renewed his diving license and changed his signature hairstyle.
- Viggo Mortensen approached the film's director Ron Howard with a proposal that he and Colin Farrell dive themselves, rather than using stunt doubles. He and Farrell trained under the guidance of Dick Stanton and John Vonlanthen. Howard did not object.
- Diver Rick Stanton praised the filmmakers for the accuracy of their presentation of facts and said they only erred by depicting the water in the cave as murky with dirt. In reality, visibility in the cave was simply zero, but if the filmmakers had shown zero visibility, as in reality, the audience simply wouldn't have seen anything.
- According to actor Tom Bateman, Viggo Mortensen often volunteered to solve purely technical problems with the equipment and other technical issues, without waiting for specialists.
- The sets were built in a huge building the size of an airplane hangar, with equally large pools and a long, floodable tunnel with a 6-meter ceiling. The film's cast trained for several hours a day, practicing their movements and navigating different parts of the 'underwater cave'. Each subsequent section of the 'cave' was more difficult to traverse than the previous one, and was constructed while filming was underway in the previous section. The actors filmed in the corresponding section of the cave and then spent some time training to navigate the next one.
- Colin Farrell later recounted that he repeatedly experienced uncontrollable bouts of fear underwater, and that he would think twice before agreeing to underwater filming again.
- Experts brought on as consultants during filming said they had never before been present on a shoot of such complexity.
- After filming wrapped, all the actors admitted that at some point they invariably experienced panic attacks underwater.
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