Cave Rescue

The first half of the film didn't really connect with me. I thought it was not gripping enough to be a film, and not informative enough to be a documentary. The second half managed to turn the tide, and of course the ending got me in tears. I applaud everyone involved in the rescue. I was also impressed that so many people played themselves in the film. Wow. I would have liked to see more on how the boys stayed alive in the cave, but I guess there was not enough time to tell so much story.

Low budget production of the Thai cave rescue, The Ron Howard movie much better but the numerous documentaries out are actually better than the movie version.

While the real life story of the Thai boys football teams rescue was wonderful, this film was an extremely poor production. The real people playing themselves is comical at times, through no real fault of their own. Afterall they arent actors. Its very poorly laid out and extremely slow.

We need to separate out the amazing story that was the rescue of the football team, from this awful movie.

There are many lessons to be learned from this dreadful project - first to market is not always a good thing. Getting real life participants to recreate their parts often doesn't work - and ends up in repeated scenes where they just grunt. Employing low cost actors (perhaps to make them look like real people) doesn't work well either. Focussing on little bits of story that haven't had much coverage (water pumps man) just gets tedious. Repeated scenes of people cheering and congratulating each other gets really tedious. Repeated shots of murky diving gets exceedingly tedious.

Wait for a better movie version of this story, save your time and money, and avoid this film.

As a reporter who covered the real cave incident last year (2018), I feel ambivalent about this movie. I cannot enjoy it totally because the actual incident was about life and death and time that was running out fast. But I also worked in a lifestyle and entertainment editorial section and I appreciate the fact that The Cave is a movie, not a documentary, so we still need to separate fact from fiction. What I want to say is that it's a very all right movie if you are not very serious about accuracy. The movie needed heroes and villains for the script to work, but the reality that I covered has every single person as the hero and there is no villain, only conflicts stemming from good intentions.