‘The Rescue’ recounts the mission to save a dozen Thai children trapped in a cave

In 2018, a junior soccer team and their assistant coach went into a nearby cave in Thailand’s Chiang Rai province. It was a week before the cave was to close for monsoon season, but that year the rains came early, trapping them inside. The world spent the next 18 days watching a life-and-death rescue mission that involved 10,000 people and more than 100 divers.

The Rescue tells this story in full detail. Directors Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin partnered with National Geographic, for whom they’d made Free Solo, an Oscar-winning film which documents Alex Honnold’s attempt to climb El Capitan without a rope. But this time, the husband and wife team couldn’t take their usual verite approach, since filming was after the fact. They also faced the hurdle of Covid. Production had been scheduled to begin in Thailand in February 2020, then everything went into lockdown.

Despite this, they managed to craft a riveting film by surgically assembling multiple elements: some 2000 archive clips, including never-before-seen footage from the Thai Navy Seals; interviews with rescuers and government officials; VFX renderings of the cave based on a 3D scan; and reenactments by the divers themselves.

The masterminds behind the rescue plan were an unlikely duo: retired firefighter Richard Stanton and IT consultant John Volanthen, both middle-aged Englishmen who did cave diving as a hobby. They and other volunteer cave divers were ordinary middleclass citizens — except for this niche hobby, which left them better equipped than the Thai Navy Seals to navigate the narrow passageways, murky waters, and strong currents in the Tham Luang cave. Another central player was Dr. Richard “Harry” Harris, an Australian anesthesiologist and experienced cave diver. He reluctantly agreed to the duo’s plan to anesthetize the children to prevent panic during their three-hour journey out of the cave — a detail that was kept secret for quite some time.

“They’re facing two really bad choices,” Chin summarizes. “One: Leave them in there to die slowly. Or two: anesthetize them and potentially kill them trying to get them out.”

The following scene is a five-minute sequence showing the first boy’s rescue. “The objective of that scene was to allow audiences to understand the feelings and experience of those rescue divers, because they were truly uncertain,” says Vasarhelyi. “Harry says: ‘It felt like euthanasia.’ ” But with oxygen running low in the chamber where the boys were trapped, it was their only hope. […]

Published in Documentary magazine, September 21, 2021