Disclaimer: The movie and therefore this review are related to Thailand. While there are currently anti-monarchy protests and governmental abuse of protesters happening there right now, they were not happening when this movie was made, nor during the events it depicts. I support the protesters in their desire for freedom. However, this review will not otherwise address the issue aside from this disclaimer.
There are a number of movies called "The Cave". At least three. One, a poorly rated 2005 movie about cave explorers finding monsters underground (a twin-film with "The Descent", a movie I adore). There's "The Cave" (2019) that is a war documentary about female doctors in Syria.
Also in 2019 was "The Cave," about the group of Thai kids that got trapped in a cave in northern Thailand in 2018, or more accurately, about the attempts to free them. Since one of two movie theaters in my town just opened, there weren't a lot of options about what movie to see, so I ended up at that "The Cave".
The movie opens with this group of 12 kids playing soccer, and then almost immediately their coach blows his whistle, they all stop playing, he says "Let's go to The Cave!" so they all hop on their bikes and head to the cave. No build-up. No establishing character. Just dive right in.
The rest of the movie is mostly just various groups of people saying "this is gonna be hard, if it rains more they're gonna drown," and "how can we pump this water out," or "what can we do to get them out."
There is no real character through-line that carries the movie. You'd think in a film about a group of 13 people trapped in a cave that those 13 people would get a little more screen-time. Isn't that the real emotional center of this story? But none of those who were trapped have any actual character in this film, they are all interchangeable props. There's a short scene of them fantasizing about what they're going to eat when they get out of the cave, but that's about it. The movie spends just as much time with the kids in the cave as it does with a semi-related local religious figure.
After walking out the movie theater, I asked my wife who she thought the main character of the movie was. She said "wasn't it Jim?" Jim Warny, cave diver from Ireland who figured prominently in the rescue operation. He doesn't show up in the film until half-way through, and he doesn't get to Thailand for another 15 minutes after that. He also is played by himself, and despite no other credits in the movie I find it hard to believe he wasn't also some level of story consultant.
There is almost nothing in the movie that you couldn't have gotten out of a headline from when this story was in the actual news. I understand the desire to dramatize it, show us how things went down, show us the struggles. But please give us something to latch on to, something to care about. There needs to be an emotional through-line in the film.
As it exists, the movie almost feels more like a reenactment like you'd see in a documentary about the subject, but without the documentary bits tying the reenactment parts together. If that's what the filmmakers were going for (which you could argue, seeing as how they used multiple people who played themselves, instead of professional actors), I suppose they succeeded. But that doesn't necessarily carry what's ostensibly a narrative feature that feels longer than it's 1 hour 44 minute run-time would suggest.
Here's what I would have done different.
1) Give us some characters to care about in the cave. Spend a few minutes at the start of your film establishing the boys and the coach as real characters, instead of the props the movie uses them as. Focus on one or two boys in particular. Give them family. Give them wants, desires. Show the audience WHY we want to care about these kids. Show us what the world will lose if they never make it out of the cave. Maybe use this time to establish that the kids like to explore. Give them a reason for going into the cave aside from just "let's go to the cave!"
2) If we're going to focus on Jim Warny, then we need to establish him as a character early. As soon as we establish the Thai kids, cut to Ireland and show Jim Warny as a cave-dive expert. You might have to invent something for him to be doing to show us this. The movie as-is just shows him climbing into a crevice. I guess this is fine, but a bit more wouldn't hurt.
3) Actually show the kids struggle in the cave, starting with when they get flooded in, instead of just "oh no we stuck now," and continuing through to how they felt, what they did while trapped, how they dealt with issues like hunger and waste. There are tiny bits of this, but it isn't nearly enough. Show them struggling with the idea that maybe no one knows they're down there (obviously before contact was made). Give us the emotional impact of being trapped in a cave, instead of just "oh no, oh I'm hungry" which is what we got.
4) Tighten up the amount of characters that pop in and out of the story. Give us more of a story structure. I think the chaos of the movie was meant to be a reflection of the chaos of the operation, but it wasn't handled well. It felt more like the movie didn't know what it wanted to do. Lines and beats tended to repeat, especially in the middle section of the movie. "We need X person/thing," then "X person/thing can't come," then "X person/thing is here." This happens at least three times. Then most of them don't do anything for most of the rest of the movie.
Give us a character to follow through all that, instead of jumping between several of them, and I think it would flow better, as well as resonate more.
If all you wanted was a brief overview of the facts of the matter, I suppose this film isn't the worst you could do. But if they're going to dramatize or re-arranged the timeline of the event anyway (as an opening title text says they do), why not focus on the emotional aspect instead of the bare facts? After all, isn't the emotional resonance the reason this story was world-wide news in the first place?
