THB #194: 2 Reviews (1 More To Come)

Thirteen Lives (exclusive theaters & Amazon Prime) - I can never know what seeing Thirteen Lives would have been like without having first seen the brilliant documentary, The Rescue (now on Disney+). But for me, the Ron Howard film started a giant step behind.

I’m sure a feature could have been made of this now often-told story of the 12 kids and their coach stuck deep in a cave system in Thailand’s Tham Luang in 2018. But it probably would have to be a high-art take on the material to be great. Trying to make a conventional movie is an almost impossible task.

Why?

This is a story of brave, passionate people traveling underwater in tight spaces for about 2.5 miles from where the boys in the cave were trapped and safety. Ultimately, all of the drama is underwater and the emotional question is whether they will survive, coming up for air.

The documentary has the advantage of the divers being able to speak to their experiences and emotions, rather than Howard and screenwriter William Nicholson’s task of building characters and showing emotional subtext rather than just speaking it. On top of that, they need to bring the diving experience to life for an audience, with the inherent requirement of showing instead of telling, rather than combining description with the visual in the doc.

This is a pretty complex story. The divers travel the 2.5 miles with 5 chambers of cave space along the way. Each dive from 1 chamber to the next is somewhat different.

The single advantage that a conventional movie has over a documentary, normally, is that audiences are willing to go along with the manipulation of cameras, editing, etc for a movie movie. But in this case, the dramatic problem is that once any action - the challenge of going through a small space between chamber 2 and 3, for instance - is presented as a dramatic moment, that kind of dramatic event being presented again is repetitious for the audiece. You can only do each “gag” once, unless it is a specific call back that has to pay off in a different way.

Then there is the biggest challenge of this particular material… the real drama all takes place in the 3rd act. And once the audience has waited around with a character drama with 3 non-verbal men for 90 minutes, it’s hard to change speed. (Kind of an inverted Saving Private Ryan).

Then, when there is the moment of drama around any one or two people being saved or lost, the real story is some variation on that moment repeating 12 times. And no matter how much the script tells us - and we know - that every one of these was a special and unique challenge, our movie viewer hearts know differently. Because it’s a movie.

Finally, there is the social problem of this moment in which a bunch of very white men come to Thailand and save 13 brown boys. The story is true, so you can’t argue with those facts. But I felt the movie really wanted to be about the central 3 white men and their experience of this situation, in which they were truly heroic. The film has its moments with each man. But Howard and Nicholson had to be very careful about not losing the soveriegnty of this being a Thai story. Moreover, as stated before, there is very little drama in the kids being stuck… unless you go very, vary dark. And the story involves some buffonery on the part of the Thai government and some failure on the part of the Thai military. Very tough boundaries to recreate naturally high drama without turning it into a white savior story. (I don’t think it is… but I’m not as into the symbolic as some.)

So, Dance 3, Looks 10 for Thirteen Lives. I really wanted to be taken away by this film. Love the actors. I have great respect for the director and writer. But dramatically, every time it takes a step forward, it feels forced to take a step backward. So it’s not so satisfying. And when placed next to the documentary, The Rescue, it can’t compete. In fact, Chin and Vasarhelyi had to use a lot of unconventional tools to make it work as a documentary, which probably cost them the Oscar nomination they deserved.

When we were underwater in a cave space with Ron Howard’s camera, I knew it was hard and they were trying so hard to make it real and they wanted to honor these men and their relentlessness and the power of saving life. And at moments, it does. But in those murky waters, the truth is simply less interesting in fact than in imagination. The challenge of merging both was just beyond.

Light & Magic (Disney+) - I assume Disney thinks it has this year’s The Beatles: Get Back here. And it almost does. Lawrence Kasdan directs the doc on the history of Industrial Light & Magic, the first and still one of the most important visual effects houses.

This film is an absolute delight from start to near-finish. The film, obviously supported by Disney, LucasFilm, ILM, etc, has pretty much everyone’s cooperation and access to all kinds of souvenirs of the birth and growth of the company. Are punches pulled? Surely. But who cares? It’s like criticizing the paper band on the $10,000 stack of bills.

As someone who knows some of the players and has spent time on the old ILM campus (aka industrial park buildings), it was a laugh and a giggle throughout. But I think for someone who knows nothing of ILM, it might be even better. Especially if you love the films for which they created magic.

The only problem for the doc is when it tries to make the move to modern day. Everything that is so pleasurable about the journey until then fades a bit, as the film decides not to acknowledge the spread of CG effects to a number of additional major players, connected to many of the original teams at ILM. To me, seeding the other companies and inspiring the talent at these FX houses, across the globe, is something of which to be extremely proud. The ongoing competition (and cooperation) between WETA and ILM is one of the great things for movies ever. The movie is so great at showing how one innovation builds on another… but not to the point of acknowledging this is not just an in-house thing.

But I recommend the first 5 hours without any reservation at all. A true pleasure.

Not quite Get Back, simply because there is a concentrated magic to The Beatles and the end of The Beatles that bounces between the very human and the legendary that just isn’t on offer in many stories at all, ever. But the intimacy of Get Back… there is definitely some of that.

But even more so, there is a sense that CG is now so advanced that the era of men and women who put together these glorious moments with spit and gum and duct tape is gone. And that our innocence in believing it is, also, gone.

It isn’t. There will always be a next. But for those of us old enough to have seen Star Wars in first run, this is a beautiful remembrance of something special. For youngers, it is history that they should know and appreciate as they enjoy the massive CG effects that are so normal to them now.

Take the time.