Here is Ron Howard’s decent retelling of an amazing true-life story: the Tham Luang cave rescue in northern Thailand in 2018, when international volunteers and Thai Navy Seals battled to rescue 12 teenage boys and their football coach trapped in a flooded cave. Howard and screenwriter William Nicholson have the tricky job of following last year’s excellent documentary on this subject, The Rescue, by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi.
Just as with Howard’s other near-disaster-movie Apollo 13, we have the unlucky number right up there in the title. When the 13 were stranded in the cave, caught unawares by the torrential downpour, a colossal mission got under way which involved thousands of volunteers frantically pumping, draining and diverting the rainwater so that they wouldn’t drown, while the authorities tried to think what to do.
