In summer 2018, it was impossible to escape minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, and day-by-day updates to the story of 12 Thai tween and teen members of a soccer team and one of their adult coaches, all of whom were trapped in the flooded Tham Luang Nang Non cave system. As the Thai military worked with a team of international divers to figure out how to penetrate the cave system and find the boys, news crews from around the world set up camp. (You might remember that Elon Musk inserted himself into the situation in a typically messy way.) And after the boys were saved, a rights’ bidding war took place. Netflix ended up with the rights for the boys’ story and National Geographic Documentary Films ended up with the rights for the divers’ story, and so that’s where “The Rescue” focuses.
The divers’ perspective is theoretically an exciting position from which to approach this story. These people traveled from around the world to Thailand on their own dime to volunteer in a high-stress environment—a life-and-death situation, really—amid an array of cultural and language barriers. But what hampers “The Rescue” from the beginning is that Vasarhelyi and Chin are working backward. Unlike their previous documentaries “Meru” and “Free Solo,” in which the duo were involved from the beginning, shooting their own material and guiding the projects forward with their own perspectives, “The Rescue” is more of a collect-and-shape project. Vasarhelyi and Chin had 87 hours of footage shot by others with which to work, with number of interviews conducted over Zoom, and the result is that “The Rescue” lacks a certain level of urgency.
But “The Rescue” starts promisingly, and with very little preamble. Outside of the Mae Sai cave, where monsoon floods have trapped members of the local Wild Boars youth football team, the atmosphere is one of barely organized chaos. A mess of military members, divers, and volunteers are trying to figure out operational logistics (how to keep power on, how to keep water out), while relatives weep and pray, and reporters wait. Once we’re right there, the documentary backs up, explaining the geology of the cave (limestone retains water), its 10 km-long layout (with numerous twists and turns), and the mythology surrounding it (the goddess Nang Non, for whom the cave system is named). Then, with all of that in place, “The Rescue” turns its attention to the British and Aussie divers who traveled to Thailand at the request of British expat and diver Vern Unsworth, who lives in the country and saw that the responders needed more experienced assistance. “We’d never done an operation like this before,” one of the members of the Thai military admits as they face six inches of rain per hour in the monsoon season, and so outside help was a necessity.
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