As many others have pointed, the past several years have been so tumultuous that we have mostly forgotten major events that happened only a short time before. Anyway there was a moment when the entire world was fully absorbed in the drama of the Tham Luang cave rescue in Thailand and this documentary tells the story from the perspective of the foreign cave diving experts who were essential to the rescue effort. It was made by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, the same team who made the immensely successful Free Solo, and it does a great job with the material. Note however that it omits the story from the perspective of the trapped children and their coach themselves because of complicated rights issues.

In line with its focus on the foreigners’ side of things, this documentary opens with Vern Unsworth, a British caver who lives in Chiang Rai, arriving on the scene when he learns of the twelve children and their coach being trapped in the cave. He recommends that the authorities call upon the expertise of the world’s top cave divers and they duly arrives three days later. Thai Navy SEALs attempt to search for the boys but are unable to make much headway as they are not trained to operate in caves. Two British divers Richard Stanton and John Volanthen soon locate some trapped adult workers not far from the entrance who were not even known to be missing. While extracting them, their struggling causes the two to realize how difficult it would be to rescue the children. Meanwhile outside large teams of people were working to use to pumps to lower the water level inside the cave and even divert water off the hill on top of it. As the days pass and it starts raining again, the two believe that the children are already dead and are ready to give up. But the Thai government insists on continuing and days later the British divers find the children in the deepest part of the cave, hungry but in good health.

We do get interviews with some Thai people, the widow of the Thai Navy SEAL who died in the cave for one, the Army doctor who joined the children and was one of the last to leave, plus rather oddly the Thai girlfriend of Stanton. But there are no interviews with any of the children or their coach, so this film doesn’t tell their side of the story at all. It seems that access to them was exclusively sold to Netflix which made a series from their experiences. This means that this is a good account of the technical challenges of finding and then extracting the boys and gives a decent idea of the huge scale of the effort that was required, involving thousands of people. There is also plenty about the fears and worries of the foreign divers including why anyone would be so passionate about so dangerous a sport as cave diving. But there is nothing here about the story of the boys themselves and the unimaginable fear and suffering they must endured being stuck in the dark for so many days with no food, dwindling oxygen and having to watch the flood waters which might eventually submerge the entire cave. Personally I’m not enthusiastic about watching a 6-episode series with actors reenacting everything when we could be watching the real thing but the lack of that side of the story is a serious deficit of this particular film.

Still I am the kind of person who is more fascinated by the technical side of things so I felt right at home here. There are all kinds of details such as the Australian anesthetist Richard Harris explaining exactly which drugs he decided to use and why; a look at the side-mounted custom rebreathers Stanton and Volanthen designed themselves; even the daisy-chain organization of thousands of people to move water and dirt and even transport the boys on stretchers. I would have loved more explanation of the impromptu dam they built on top of the hill to divert water but since this was a Thai-led effort this film doesn’t have much on that. It was also fascinating to see how so many of these cave divers are self-professed individualists and loners who don’t do well in group sports. They are happy that their very specialized skills turned out to be so valuable in this specific niche scenario of course but they are honest and adamant that they only developed those skills for their own personal enjoyment.

This documentary also captures the intense media blitz and how the event held the attention of the world for a brief moment. Plus of course only someone heartless could fail to be moved when they finally succeed in getting the children out alive. Once again Vasarhelyi and Chin delivered an incredible film though I am so curious how they set out doing this. Did they just jump on a plane immediately upon hearing the news? Some critics have pointed out that their inability to speak Thai explains why this film features so few Thai perspectives. In the end, while this documentary has its deficiencies, I feel that it does a good enough job of covering what happened that I have no pressing need to seek more of the other documentaries and dramatic adaptations that were made. It did inspire me to go through the Wikipedia article on the rescue effort to get a more complete understanding of what happened.