User Reviews

It’s easy to see why the creators chose to remake this story as a film. After all, the documentary itself have required too many staged sequences to tell the story clearly.

A great story powerfully told Aside from space, there can be no working environment as potentially dangerous, perilously exacting, and psychologically isolating as the ocean floor. Colloquially known as "doing sat", saturation diving is a technique to reduce decompression sickness amongst divers who work at great depths for long periods. Living in either an onboard pressurised capsule or a self-sustaining pressurised underwater habitat, divers breathe a helium-oxygen mix that prevents nitrogen narcosis, transferring to and from the work site via a pressurised diving bell. Written by Alex Parkinson and directed by Parkinson and Richard da Costa, Last Breath uses a mixture of talking head interviews, black box footage, camcorder material, and excellently mounted reconstructions, telling its story as if it were an underwater survival thriller. And although the directors' insistence on building to a predictable and overly manipulated pseudo-twist undermines the seriousness of the material somewhat, this is still a superbly realised film. September 18, 2012; the commercial engineering ship Bibby Topaz is 115 miles off the coast of Scotland, assigned with testing the safety of a drilling manifold. Descending in the diving bell are Chris Lemons, David Yuasa, and Duncan ****. As the men descend, the Topaz is hit with bad weather, although not bad enough to cancel the dive. As Lemons and Yuasa begin working, **** remains in the bell to feed out the divers' "umbilicals"; a mass of cables that brings them warm water, light, and oxygen, and keeps them connected to the Topaz's computer and AV systems. With the Topaz locked into position by its Dynamic Positioning (DP) system, everything is going well until the system inexplicably fails, and the Topaz begins to drift out of position, dragging the bell with it, which in turn drags the divers via their umbilicals. Lemons and Yuasa are immediately ordered back to the bell, but Lemons's umbilical snags on the manifold, and after being pulled taut, it snaps. With only five minutes of emergency oxygen in his reserve tanks, and cut off from all contact with the bell and the surface, his crewmates are horrified to realise it will take them at least 30 minutes to return to their position and try to find him. And at a depth of 300 feet, in pitch blackness, with ten times atmospheric pressure and temperatures just above freezing, it seems impossible he could survive long enough for rescue. Although the talking head interviews are a little flat, the rest of Last Breath looks great, with the reconstructions so well done (it helps that the actual participants play themselves) that they blend seamlessly with the footage shot from the divers' helmet-cams and the Topaz's cameras. The film opens with "first-person" camcorder footage of Lemons giving a tour of the Topaz, explained naturally insofar as he and his fiancée, Morag Martin, tended to send one-another videos rather than writing emails or letters. This inculcates the audience immediately into the milieu, insofar as Lemons is literally explaining the workings of the job, especially important in introducing the concept of saturation diving. The film's structure is both its greatest strength and, perhaps, it's most significant failing. It's difficult to discuss this aspect without spoilers, but essentially, Parkinson and Da Costa introduce a twist of sorts in the last act, and the documentary then literally rewinds to give us the perspective of an interviewee we haven't seen up to this point. It's both an interesting and irritating technique; interesting insofar as you don't usually see that kind of structural trickery in a documentary, irritating because it's unnecessary. The directors would have been better served to simply trust in the strength of their story, which is more than able to stand on its own. And although it isn't as damaging as a similar example in Three Identical Strangers (2018), primarily because the surrounding material is handled more competently, with less crass emotional manipulation, it is nevertheless an ill-advised technique. This is compounded by the fact that it's easy to see it coming, and anyone who spends more than 20 seconds looking into the film will have the twist spoiled, rendering it pointless at best, distracting at worst. This misstep notwithstanding, Last Breath is an excellent piece of documentary filmmaking. Combining elements of the survival documentary subgenre with the aesthetic tropes of the submarine/submersible movie, the film admirably conveys what for these men is a normal working day; claustrophobia, isolation, an unforgiving environment. Cogently depicting the very strong bonds that form in such circumstances, the film presents a group of very likeable people who have as much respect for one another as they do reverence for the ocean itself.