The 2018 cave rescue of Tham Luang is an incredible story. A school team and their coach got stuck while exploring some caves for two weeks due to flooding. It was an international effort to get them out, making it ripe to become a great thriller movie.
Ron Howard has adapted the tale into a new drama movie for Prime Video, called Thirteen Lives. The film, starring Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen, charts not just the group of children and their sole guardian who’re trapped by a mass of water and rock, but the painstaking rescue that was gradually put together in the meantime.
Over the course of a week, the kids were discovered, a plan was devised, and an operation that involved thousand of people assisting via all manner of disciplines managed to get every single one of those stranded out alive. It’s a perfect example of what we’re capable of when we work together, and from the looks of the trailer, should make for a great action movie.
Joel Edgerton, who recently rejoined Star Wars in Obi-Wan Kenobi, is also in the cast. William Nicholson wrote the screenplay, from a story by he and Don Macpherson.
Thirteen Lives was announced in April 2020, and filmed between Australia and Thailand. There’ll be a limited theatrical release before it becomes available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
The official synopsis reads: “In the true story of Thirteen Lives, twelve boys and the coach of a Thai soccer team explore the Tham Luang cave when an unexpected rainstorm traps them in a chamber inside the mountain. Entombed behind a maze of flooded cave tunnels, they face impossible odds. A team of world-class divers navigate through miles of dangerous cave networks to discover that finding the boys is only the beginning.”
Thirteen Lives is on Amazon Prime Video August 5.