After hovering over it a bunch of times, I finally broke down and clicked to watch this third retelling of the Thai soccer team rescue from 2018. I didn’t see a need to watch another version, but my curiosity got the best of me. How would this do up against a Ron Howard directed Hollywood production with real movie stars? Or a National Geographic documentary?

Cave Rescue exists in this nether realm between a drama and a documentary. Unfortunately, the excellent drama on Amazon Prime Video (Thirteen Lives) and the equally good documentary on Disney+ (The Rescue) simply handle the story better.

This is an earnest attempt filmed on location using (sometimes quite obviously) people playing themselves. It wants to tell a bit more of the story, but it has so little interest in developing characters OR drama/suspense, it might as well be a documentary. Plus it has the habit of explaining events via title cards that are sometimes on-screen too quickly to read.

Dramatic moments are presented so abruptly that they barely seem important… like the sole casualty in the film going from a living diver to a dead one without detail or depth. They barely spend time explaining the rescue plan and, in fact, provide details after they’ve already rescued four kids.

It does try (half-heartedly) to give us more details surrounding the story. For example, a local businessmen trying to deliver water pumps to the scene (only to be rebuffed by bureaucracy). But he’s dropped half-way through the movie. Or half-heartedly bringing in a Chinese cave diving instructor… only to drop him after about five minutes. Or show us some kind of US naval command center in a few scenes and then forgetting about them too.

Calling this a drama is an insult to movies that develop character and suspense. Calling it a documentary is an insult to movies that actually teach you something. It’s a half measure where two great films already exist.

Score: 68