directed by Ron Howard and starring Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell as British cave rescue divers Rick Stanton and John Volanthen. It was initially released to movie theatres for a few days, then moved to Prime Video.The events it depicts are simple enough to summarise; twelve members of a junior football team and their coach are trapped underground in a flooded cave, and a team of divers rescue them. Except that they are 2.5 kilometres from the entrance, the flooded caves are insanely cramped and twisted, the would-be rescuers don't even know whether they are alive to begin with, and the monsoon season is coming, which means that the caves will soon fill completely with water...
Tropes appearing in the movie include:
- Apologises a Lot: When the divers first find the team, their coach keeps apologising for getting the kids in his charge into this situation, and fears that their parents will blame him. In fact, whatever happened to cause this, he kept them alive and sane for several days in the dark with no supplies, and the boys make it clear that they feel only respect for him.
- Artistic License – Geology: According to one diver who was involved in the rescue, the film's main break from reality is that the water is shown as clear, when actually it was horribly muddy. Not being able to see what is happening at all during the diving scenes might have been a problem for the audience.
- Bamboo Technology: A small but important real-world example; when the team struggling to divert water from further flooding the cave starts running out of plastic pipes, a local demonstrates to them that large bamboo stems can be quickly converted into ad hoc guttering.
- Bittersweet Ending: It’s mostly sweet; the rescue actually goes better than any of the divers perhaps expected, with all the boys and their coach alive and quite well. However, one of the cave divers hears that his father has died in hospital while he was in Thailand, and the Thai Navy SEALS don't forget that they have lost one of their number. (Also, another will die from infections picked up during the rescue a few months later.) Life and death go on.
- Creepy Cave: Present but downplayed. The cave is deadly, and will kill you if you let it, but there's nothing uncanny involved; it is simply cramped, dark, and filling up with water.
- Heroic Sacrifice:
- Thai Navy diver Saman Gunan drowns while participating in the rescue effort. His death seems almost arbitrary, though, bringing home the point that this is an extraordinarily challenging task even for skilled and experienced divers; it leads the Thai authorities to ban the Navy divers from entering the difficult final sections of the cave, handing the task over to the specialists.
- A non-fatal but important version arises when the teams working to divert water that would otherwise flood the cave further realise that their only option is to send it down the mountain and onto the fields worked by local farmers. The farmers accept the loss of their crops with heroic stoicism.
- Heroic BSoD: Chris Jewell is overwhelmed after getting lost in the cave system and has trouble regaining focus. Richard Harris gently offers to take over and take the final boy the rest of the way so that some of the stress gets taken off his colleague.
- Honor Thy Parent: It's mostly downplayed, but Thai society is depicted as having a Confucian regard for elders. Early on, the only member of the football team who doesn't go to the cave, because he has to go and help his parents with some task, is praised by the coach as a good son; later, at one point, when the British divers (healthy men in their 40s or 50s) are offering some useful information based on their experience, a local refers to them as "the old men", somewhat to their bemusement — but this actually seems to be implying that they should be respected for their wisdom.
- Hope Spot: When the British divers find the kids and their coach, word soon gets out, bringing hope to their parents and other bystanders. Stanton is horrified, though; he knows just how difficult it will be to get the kids out, and realistically has to think that they are going to die anyway.
- Ignored Expert: To begin with, the British cave divers are treated somewhat as interlopers by the local rescue workers, especially the Navy SEALS, who are tough professional soldiers who (rightly) see themselves as skilled divers. It doesn't help that the Thai authorities are worried by the PR risk of foreigners dying in the midst of their operation. However, the trope is averted once the cave divers prove their specialist skills, and especially once they locate the boys.
- The Medic: This being a realistic depiction of a competent rescue operation, the rescuers naturally bring some medics with them.
- When some of the Thai SEAL team remain with the boys in the cave, one of the group is a doctor who can monitor the kids' health.
- Later, the British divers call in the Australian "Harry" Harris, a fellow cave diver but also a doctor — in this case, because their desperate rescue plan needs his specific skills as an anaesthetist.
- Meditation Powerup: It's mostly a background detail, but it is part of the true story, in low-key realistic form — the kids survive for several days in a dark, wet cave without supplies. It turns out that their coach, who is trapped with them, is a former Buddhist monk who was able to teach them meditation techniques, which may have helped a lot.
- Mighty Whitey: Scrupulously averted as far as the real events permitted. The filmmakers were fully aware of the danger of making a "white saviour" story, and took care to show the countless Thai rescue workers involved in the effort. However, the actual rescue was necessarily performed by a team of highly specialised cave divers, and the only people with the required skills were a small group of westerners. It helped that Mortensen and Farrell, two Hollywood stars fully capable of playing swashbuckling action stars, played the lead divers as a pair of nondescript middle-aged men who just happened each to have thirty years of experience in their field.
- Mood Whiplash:
- When the British divers report that they have found the kids and their coach, most people start celebrating. However, Stanton points out that actually rescuing them may be impossible, and they will probably die anyway.
- Later, as the actual rescue starts moving along successfully, the trope threatens to cut in at least twice, though it is actually just about averted. On the last day of the effort, the water has risen significantly, and the divers have to seriously consider calling off the attempt that day. Then, the mask which the team have acquired for the smallest of the boys looks like it may still be too large for him. They make it fit, but there is a definite fear that they may lose him.
- No Antagonist: The only villain in this story is the looming monsoon. There is a very little friction between the cave divers and the Navy SEALS, but that is abandoned as the rescue gets underway. Any Conflict is strictly of the "Man vs. Nature" variety.
- Oh, Crap!:
- Australian cave diver and doctor "Harry" Harris is called in to assist by the British divers, and is perfectly willing to help. However, the other two then tell him why they have asked for him; he is a professional anaesthetist, and their desperate plan is to get the kids out by sedating them and passing them through two kilometres of flooded caves like packages. As Harris immediately points out, this has never been done, is ethically questionable and probably illegal, and will very likely leave them with twelve dead children on their hands.
- During the rescue, John Volanthen realizes that the boy he's ferrying stops breathing whenever he's facedown, leading to tension as the Volanthen and the SEALs try to figure out what's wrong.
- In the last phases, Chris Jewell loses the guide rope and comes up in an unfamiliar chamber, alone with an unconscious boy who'll die if he isn't taken to the hospital soon.
- Almost as soon as the final boy is rescued, the pumps keeping the water at bay in the cave give out, threatening to drown everyone inside and trap the Navy SEALs yet to come out. Captain Arnont can only splash around while waiting for the telltale sign of flashlights coming out of the flooded mouth.
- Plot Threads: While the focus of the film is on the divers and support workers struggling to reach and extract the kids, it occasionally cuts to the Thai water engineer leading a team of locals on the mountain above the cave, working to block sinkholes and divert rainwater from flooding into the cave system, thereby buying time for the rescue.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: The provincial governor, Narongsak Osatanakorn, who has charge of the rescue effort, listens to experts and clearly does his best to decide what is most likely to succeed. He is obviously under a lot of pressure and occasionally struggles with decisions, but he fits the trope.
- Rescue: Obviously the movie is about a rescue, but the story actually fits the trope definition in a slightly broader sense; although it's not mentioned in the movie, Stanton and Volanthen are part of a loose organisation of volunteers, coordinated by the British Cave Rescue Council, which can be called in to deal with situations such as this.
- Retirony: Thai Navy diver Saman Gunan was a tragic real-world borderline case of the trope; he was already retired but came back as a volunteer to help with the rescue, rejoined his old unit, and died in the caves (the only person to do so during the work). The film includes him and does rather play into the cliché.
- Ripped from the Headlines: The selling point of this rather linear, villain-free story is that, yes, all this really happened.
- The Scapegoat: Governor Narongsak is in charge of the province where the incident occurs, but is a few days from departing his job when it starts; he is kept around by the central government to supervise the rescue effort. It is explicitly stated by one character that he is assumed to be serving as a potential scapegoat for a catastrophe. Fortunately he rises to the occasion, making a series of right calls and handling the press competently.
- Snobs Vs Slobs: Part of the dynamic between the Thai Navy SEALs and British cave divers. The SEALs are the best the Thai military has to offer and have every resource the government can muster for the occasion. The Brits, on the other hand, are self-trained hobbyists using homemade, improvised equipment. The SEALs eventually come to respect the cave divers' skills and the two settle into a solid working dynamic.
