One marriage, two movie reviews: The Rescue

The Rescue. Photo / Supplied

Greg and Zanna consider the value of the nerd.

SCORES
Dress sense: 0
Visible muscles: 0
Lives saved: 13

SHE SAW

I couldn't sleep the night we watched The Rescue. I kept picturing the footage of the 12 Thai boys and their coach crouched on a muddy rock where they'd been trapped for nine nights, their sweet little faces staring so pleadingly at the two British divers who had discovered them, miraculously alive but starving and exhausted. Unable to communicate properly because of the language barrier, the divers had to leave those boys with a half-understood promise they'd return but no clue how they would actually get them out. I cannot think of a more horrifying predicament and I have not been able to think about much else since.

I followed the rescue back in 2018, so I was fully aware of the triumph that this film was going to present to me but I found myself physically anxious throughout. It's an incredible documentary thanks in large part to the husband and wife film-makers, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, getting access to 87 hours of footage recorded by the Thai Navy Seals who were a vital part of the rescue operation. In addition, they filmed some of the most realistic recreations I've ever seen, using divers who were involved in the rescue. One of the most annoying parts of watching films with me is that I'm always pointing out how the sausage is made but, mid-viewing, I turned to Greg and said with genuine uncertainty, "Is that a recreation or not?"

After the film, Greg started a speech about how this was a film about "nerd heroes". He was very excited, in a self-identifying kind of way, that this odd bunch of geeky nobodies had been called together from all over the world to pull off the most difficult rescue of our lifetimes, like the Nerd Avengers. He saw himself in them, an underestimated dork just waiting for the call up to come and save lives with ... words?

The film is told primarily from the perspective of the divers who performed the rescue, in particular the two British divers, John Volanthen and Rick Stanton, who were the first to discover the boys, and Dr Richard Harris, the Australian anaesthetist and cave diver who chose and administered the sedation protocol that would give the boys the best chance of surviving the three-to-four-hour dive. It was a ludicrously dangerous rescue and Harris was anything but confident of its success. He says two things are painfully etched in his memory: tying the children's hands behind their backs and pushing their unconscious heads under water. Now they're etched in mine as well.

HE SAW

The heroes at the centre of this documentary are heroes I can get on board with: unimpressive, unattractive, bad at soundbites and quite open about their absence of heroic qualities. Not long after their first forays into the cave in which 12 boys and their soccer coach were trapped, they admit they tried to give up and go home to the UK, leaving a group of hapless navy divers and a handsome rando from Belgium to push on.

This is a movie about the power of nerds. Zanna was upset it didn't feature more about the rescued boys themselves, but there are probably good reasons for that and anyway, that would have been another documentary. This is an important movie because it features heroes of a type that are rarely seen on the big screen because it's believed their non-conforming faces and lack of charisma will fail to sell movie tickets.

Early in the film, I said to Zanna, "I hope there's a lot of diagrams." Only minutes later, the first diagram arrived, showing the entire cave system, several kilometres long, beautifully rendered, presumably by nerds, using some advanced 3D computer modelling program. Crucially, it showed the cave in fly-over rather than fly-through, giving much-needed perspective regarding length and difficulty of ingress/egress, along with many useful annotations, labels and representations of water and air pockets. This was the diagram I had yearned for during the unfolding of the rescue story three years ago, when I had tried and failed to envisage the size of the task confronting the rescuers. Suddenly, through the wonders of computer programming and advanced graphics interfaces, the horror was made real.

The movie's heroes are some of the world's leading exponents of cave diving, maybe the world's most antisocial sport/hobby. I assume they know each other mostly from the internet, where I presume they conduct most of their social lives. Some of them admit they find it comforting to spend long periods in tiny spaces far under both ground and water.

Given their self-professed lack of social skills and their improbably unimpressive mostly middle-aged physiques, it's a miracle any of these guys ended up convincing the Thai Government to let them go in the cave at all, let alone attempt to carry out 12 children.

Afterwards, Zanna said some of the heroes were probably really annoying at home. I said, "Big deal, we're all really annoying at home." She didn't dispute that.

The Rescue is in cinemas from November 18.