Critic Reviews

Thirteen Lives is a film that truly orients itself around a grounded cinematic approach to story, one largely told without big, grandstanding emotional speeches but instead focused on visually capturing subjectivity, demonstrating tension, and highlighting the life-or-death weight of the characters' choices.utm_campaign=clip

As scripted, documentary-style fact-based dramas go, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Thirteen Lives is not an exhibition of spectacle in scale or execution. It neither skirts over details too quickly nor goes too deep into technical aspects, arming the audience with enough to know how much is at stake and why. It’s an examination and dramatization of adversity and the complexity, strength, and resilience of the human spirit, which perfectly draws characterizations that avoid hammy tropes and tired stereotypes.

Howard’s film is a paean to the courage and canniness of the seasoned non-professional: subterranean heroism has never looked so down-to-earth.

A story of overwhelming humanitarian sacrifice.

In Thirteen Lives, Ron Howard sheds the spectacle of the 2018 Thai soccer team cave rescue by recreating the impossible logistics, choices, and dangers with intimacy and chilling claustrophobia.

Luckily, we have the benefit of being able to read the future even as we watch Thirteen Lives, and that leaves us free to enjoy Howard’s crackerjack storytelling skills, not to mention the picture’s bracing, casually heroic lead performances.

Despite the fact that we all know the outcome, and that it’s the third film in as many years to tell the story, Ron Howard’s account of the drama is compulsively watchable and breathlessly tense.

We are left with a properly entertaining drama that gets across the technical details with great efficiency. A good job of work by a reliable Hollywood professional.

All too often, in life and in cinema, systems are shown as working simply to oppress: Thirteen Lives reminds us that communal acts can be what literally save us.