![]() From the distance of history, we can start to see the bigger picture. “By seeing this kind of story in the context of ultimately triumphalist entertainment, we risk seeing every tragic event, every terrorist activity, as just more fodder for big-screen storytelling (as it already is on cable news networks), rather than as part of a larger picture,” I wrote. Strike while the headline is hot, the better to capture an audience with a short attention span.Īs I noted when writing about Patriots Day - starring Mark Wahlberg as a beat cop trying to foil the very real bombing at the 2013 Boston Marathon - there can be a real ick factor in rushing stories to the screen. ![]() You could have predicted the rush, I guess, since it’s a given that very recent news - cons and scams, disasters, acts of heroism - gets rapidly turned into movies and miniseries. Even PureFlix, the company that brought us God’s Not Dead and other evangelical content, planned to take a crack at it. Last year’s documentary The Rescue, from the directors of the Oscar-winning Free Solo, nabbed a handful of awards. In 2019, the Thai film The Cave was released, directed by Thai-Irish director Tom Waller. Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights director Jon M. A scripted Netflix miniseries was announced. A mere three days after the last of the group were rescued, a made-for-TV documentary called Operation Thai Cave Rescue aired on the Discovery Channel. The boys and their coach had barely returned home before an entire swarm of projects were announced, ready to tell of their harrowing rescue. The cinematic potential of the real-life rescue was apparent from the start. Thank God that’s not the movie Ron Howard made. Oh, and over the credits, we’d see pictures of the “real” people next to the actors who played them. And in the end, the ordeal would serve as a valuable character development lesson for the diver, who would have an epiphany during the experience. (This would all be heightened to make sure the audience knew the real stakes of the operation.) All of the Thai characters would go unnamed, props supporting the Englishman’s archetypal hero’s journey. We’d spend several scenes with his estranged wife and child, both of whom he loves but doesn’t see enough. His motivation would be laboriously constructed through some kind of flashback to his own soccer-loving youth. We’d get a great deal of his backstory before we dove into the action. This imaginary, overly Hollywoodized version, scored to nonstop swoony music, would center on a middle-aged English cave diver, one of the volunteers who flew to northern Thailand in 2018 to help rescue a dozen young soccer players and their coach from the Tham Luang cave. It’s distressing - and far too simple - to imagine a terrible version of Thirteen Lives. ![]()
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