Posted on 01/27/2022 11:08:21 AM PST by Brookhaven
We all followed the events of the cave rescue. We think we know what happened. But we don’t.
“The Rescue”, by directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, has peered behind the heroic narrative that was cultivated at the time of the Chiang Rai Tham Luang cave rescue in July 2018.
13 young men – 12 teenagers and their 24 year old soccer coach – rode their bikes to the Tham Luang Caves in Chiang Rai, Northern Thailand, for a quick excursion following training of the Mu Pa (wild boars) team. It was Saturday, June 23, 2018. Following torrential monsoonal rain, trapping the team inside, they wouldn’t be seen for a harrowing 9 days, until a team of volunteer cave divers happened upon them. This film explains how improbable finding them was.
It would be another 8 days before an unlikely, and totally implausible, rescue mission eventually brought them all out. Alive.
“The Rescue” shows that this first happenstance, finding the young men, and then actually getting them out alive, was much, much more tenuous and complicated than anyone wanted to admit at the time. The world media gravitated to the compelling human stories – the lost boys, the international co-operation, the worried families, the personalities – to weave and broadcast daily 3 minute grabs about heroism, Thai culture and hope.
We now know the reality was very different. Touched on in the film “The Cave”, the whole search, and then rescue, was a mess of Thai politics, misplaced pride and incompetence. Not a popular conclusion to come to, but without the international volunteer cave divers that were flown in (reluctantly by many of the Thais leading the mission), the 12 teenagers and their coach would have surely perished. Even the valiant and well-trained Thai Navy Seals were completely unprepared for a mission so fraught with danger and outside of their standard training.
“The Rescue” has been skilfully crafted and co-directed by Academy Award winners Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (“Free Solo”) to authentically recreate the situation inside the caves, then use interviews with the cave divers to retell the story. The recreated scenes are seamlessly interwoven with real video at the time.
And you will learn things you never knew about the mission, particularly about the almost impossible method of extraction that, even by their best estimates, had a minuscule chance of success. But, in the end, it was the only chance they had.
Rick Stanton was a retired British firefighter who had spent 40 years diving deep into lonely, claustrophobic caves around the world. Fortuitously, his girlfriend was a resident of Chiang Rai, so he heard about the search situation early on. Rick teamed with another cave diving mate, John Volanthen, to fly to northern Thailand to see if they could help.
There are also never-before-seen conversations between the divers, that chanced upon the team on Day 9 of the search, totally different and revealing compared to the short snippets we saw at the time.
The clips, from Rick’s phone camera, tell us a lot more about the divers and their fears. And the calmness and composure of the trapped young men. We see his attempt to rally the spirits of the 13 team members before saying goodbye with a promise of imminent rescue.
In one of the interviews Rick Stanton, slowly swimming back through the maze of jagged rocks, mud and swirling waters to the cave mouth, realised, having found them, that it would be virtually impossible to get them out.
“Looking into their faces I realised we might be the only ones that ever see them. What in earth are we going to do now?”
Another revelation is the rescue, a few days before the effort to extract the team began, of a smaller rescue of four adults stuck inside the cave. They would have to swum out where they would be immersed in the caves muddy waters for 30-40 seconds. Some of the adults, even after the process was thoroughly explained, panicked, ripping off their face mask. If not for the brevity of the dive, and the professionalism of the divers, they would have drowned.
For the 13 soccer team members trapped 2 kilometres inside the cave, they were a lot younger and they would be underwater for up to 2 to 3 hours! How could this even be possible?
“We were brutally honest, we promised multiple fatalities.”
For the re-enactments, Vasarhelyi and Chin used Rick, John and other divers who were involved in the rescue – the actors playing themselves and their frightening predicament. It also follows the completely outrageous idea from 2 Australian doctors (also cave divers) who came up with an implausible solution to extract the young men.
It’s visceral, raw and real. Highly recommended.
Full of actual footage underwater and in the cave.
I had no idea the success or failure of this mission hinged on two middle aged, weekend hobby-divers from the UK--one a retired fireman and another who described himself as a "loser" when it came to sports.
What a nightmare. Can’t imagine being the victim OR the rescuer in this situation!
It was excellent. The hobby cave divers had unique skills and experiences that were absolutely essential, were probably the only people in the world who could have pulled this off. And they were only recruited asap because one of them had a Thai girlfriend who just happened to have gone home, and who alerted the authorities that there were these crazy guys who did this sh*t for grins, and who contacted her boyfriend back in England, who got on the cave divers network, and…
So, Brookhaven, this is already available on NatGeo?
I too don’t recommend movies a lot, but this one is worth your time!!
The only thing I remember is Musk calling some guy names, and lawsuits that went away somehow
Didn’t Elon Musk call one of those guys a pedophile or something like that?
I watched it a few weeks ago. Pretty interesting. The rescue was, for all practical purposes, impossible. It took more than two hours to swim to where the boys were, in an underwater cave with passages so tight they had to take off their tanks and push them in front.
The guys who performed the underwater rescue were doubly heroic because, had they failed, the Thai government would probably have prosecuted them for murder.
This is an excellent documentary. It really hits you that they really didn’t think they would be able to save them all.
If I recall, the “loser” got knighted by the Queen of England, and will (hopefully) never pay for another beer the rest of his life - not bad! The documentary was powerful, I watched it with my kids and they were mesmerized.
As a beyond rich african americn, musk has excellent lawyers
A JDart… who knew. Thank for the heads up.
I remember that Elon Musk offered to try to help. He got into a spat with some middle-aged guy who was involved in the rescue attempt and called him a pedo. Always wondered whether there might be some civil litigation that resulted from what seemed like a very public defamation. Or perhaps Elon was just using an abbreviation for pedagogical genius.
“...but without the international volunteer cave divers that were flown in (reluctantly by many of the Thais leading the mission)...”
I recently started watching a youtube channel called Adventures with Purpose. A small group of divers that search bodies of water with their fancy fish finders (including side-scan sonar) looking for missing persons in their vehicles. Some are a few days old, some are 30-years old.
Most of the police have been pretty good, but there are some that don’t want their intrusions at all. In the last couple of years they have found something like 20 people. Some in only a few hours! Lots of these small towns don’t have the resources, but some of the towns/cities you sure wonder what the police were doing.
Taking your gear off to get through small passages is standard practice for cave diving, something I did all the time. But I never penetrated farther than a couple hundred yards, and I can’t fathom the skill and knowledge, not to mention the courage it took to pull this off.
Yes, Elon wanted to be the hero. He designed some high tech rescue pods that he expected divers to take into the caves to rescue the kids. Vernon Unsworth, the guy with actual expertise in extreme cave diving said it wouldn’t work, so Elon called him a pedo, a child rapist, etc. Unsworth sued. Most people thought he had an open and shut case, and Musk was encouraged to settle. He didn’t. Musk went to court and won.
I saw the movie. Worth it!
I think I might take up the hobby of exploring open fields.
Adventures with Purpose are good people.
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