Not unlike Alex Honnold, the emotionally withdrawn subject of Free Solo, retired firefighter Richard Stanton and IT consultant John Volanthen - British diving partners who volunteer with the UK-based Cave Rescue Organisation - are natural loners. But Stanton and Volanthen’s passion, though partly driven by similar motives, is also expressly altruistic. One can make a case that anyone who pushes the limits of human achievement, as Honnold does, is in a way glorifying the Creator of all (regardless of their intent, though whether it’s to their merit will depend on intent). The Rescue is about a massive, coordinated effort both to keep the boys alive long enough to be rescued and to make their rescue possible, but it’s also about the disposition and the mindset required to make a hobby of spending hours at a time in pitch-black, labyrinthine, water-flooded recesses in the earth. The Rescue is from husband-and-wife documentarians Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, whose Oscar-winning Free Solo was also about a devotee of an extreme sport, solo rock climbing without ropes or safety equipment. Even then, the mission would have failed had one of them not happened to have the right day job. In the end, thousands of people, including local and international volunteers, local military and police, US Special Forces, and medical professionals made crucial contributions to the success of the mission - but the rescue itself was planned and carried out by a handful of British and Australian amateur cave divers whose passion for their niche sport had cultivated in them the specific skills needed for this operation. The long, at times excruciatingly narrow twists and turns of the cave are so daunting, and the water currents at the time were so strong, that even Thai Navy SEALs were at a loss. So many factors way against the mission that success seems impossible even to imagine, let alone achieve. It’s a feel-good story in the end, but incredibly harrowing as it unfolds. The best way to learn the truth today is by watching one of two movies: the well-crafted Ron Howard drama Thirteen Lives (in theaters July 29th and on Amazon Prime August 5th) or the astonishing NatGeo documentary The Rescue (one of my top 10 films of 2021, now streaming on Disney+).īoth films are moving odes to heroism, human solidarity, and ingenuity in the face of seemingly impossible odds. If you don’t know what really happened, don’t Google it. As incredible as the operation seemed at the time, the truth is so audacious, so insane, that the full details of how the boys were rescued weren’t revealed until well after the mission was completed, and news reports even months afterward continued to perpetuate misleading, overly rosy accounts of the rescue. If you haven’t checked in on the story since then, though, you have no idea. Perhaps you were glued to the news in late June and early July of 2018 as the world followed the ultimately successful efforts in northern Thailand to rescue the 12 young boys of a soccer team and their assistant coach from the Tham Luang Nang Non cave who had become trapped by sudden flooding. SDG Original source: Catholic World Report Two films, a documentary and a drama film, tell the unbelievable story. Too good not to be true: Two movies about the Thailand cave rescue The truth behind the 18-day effort to rescue twelve young soccer players and their coach trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand was too crazy to be reported at the time.
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