by John Zenoni
Wow! What an absolutely amazing documentary ‘The Rescue’ is! Filmmakers E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, of the award winning ‘Free Solo’, return with this stunning piece of work about the 2018 rescue of 12 young Thai soccer players and their coach, stuck in a cave for 17 days. The team decides one afternoon to explore the Tham Luang cave complex in Thailand's Chiang Rai province, where once inside they're trapped by a month-early monsoon that pours down. I'm just amazed watching the documentary that they got as far as they did but it's a good thing as the location they ended up at is what turned out to be their saving grace. It made for a more difficult rescue but had they been anywhere they would have almost surely drowned.
While the never-before-seen footage is, of course, remarkable, and the ending a happy one, what really captured me most was the rescuers and their stories. Incredible, ordinary people who just happened to have a love of cave diving who helped put together a rescue effort that no one thought would be able to be pulled off. What I found interesting is that most of the people who came together to help pull off the feat were all, for the most part, individuals who did not have good experiences in school and were not good at team sports. They pretty much were loners who ended up getting into cave diving because it was an escape from the real world for them. As one of the men said at the end, and I am paraphrasing, ‘The last one picked on the cricket team, the first one called to help with the rescue.’ Just an absolutely stunning, well-made film.
"The Rescue" will be available exclusively in theaters October 8.
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