Review: The Rescue
Remember during the World Cup in 2018, when a global news story gripped the world about a group of young boys and their football coach who got trapped in a cave in Thailand for 18 days before an intrepid bunch of elite cave divers came together with the world watching to embark on a truly daring rescue attempt despite all the elements being against them.
THE RESCUE chronicles the enthralling, against-all-odds story that transfixed the world in 2018: the daring rescue of twelve boys and their coach from deep inside a flooded cave in Northern Thailand. Academy Award®-winning directors and producers E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin keep viewers on the edge of their seats as they use a wealth of never-before-seen material and exclusive interviews to piece together the high stakes mission, highlighting the efforts of the Royal Thai Navy SEALs and U.S. Air Force Special Tactics and details the expert cave divers’ audacious venture to dive the boys to safety. THE RESCUE brings alive one of the most perilous and extraordinary rescues in modern times, shining a light on the high-risk world of cave diving, the astounding courage and compassion of the rescuers, and the shared humanity of the international community that united to save the boys.
The best of humanity personified is on full view in The Rescue, a documentary that’s more gripping than most big budget disaster movies, The Rescue delivers on all fronts. For anyone who remembers the news at the time, you will be familiar with the story and the conclusion. However, you probably don’t know how the drama unfolded and how it reached it’s fortunate happy ending for nearly all involved.
The documentary retraces the story with footage from the event and some recreated scenes which involve some of the actual people involved. There are several talking heads from events that talk us through the harrowing events and the triumph over tragedy that took place.
From the opening of the film where the first section takes us through how they managed to find the boys and their incredible rescue, which features some real heart stopping moments. There are times when the cave divers are explaining when they had real human moments of wanting to give up to the real dangers of evacuating the boys out of the cave that the triumph of the spirit really comes to bear. You realise these are just normal people in a really extraordinary set of circumstances.
The documentary from E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (Free Solo) is very well put together with the usual glossy look of a National Geographic documentary that sometimes takes the sheen of the reality of the situation, but that’s a minor gripe. Watching the events unfold as if it was happening right now, will keep you transfixed throughout.
The Rescue is a hugely entertaining documentary for all the right reasons but the heart pounding operation and the dramatic events, will have you questioning if you remembered the events correctly until the very end. Powerful stuff.
