The Cave

I saw this film at the London Film Festival. It depicts the events of an unprecedented emergency on a worldwide scale. A rare piece of history retold by some of the only people that really know. The people that fully experienced the event. A rare and privileged opportunity is given to the viewer by the sharing of this perspective.

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.

I am gracious of the director putting the case into the movie. I know it from news, but never know the details. It is like seeing a very long news report. Since the incident is happened not for long, I am very interested to see the details.

The movie is full of negative comments. Yes, all the comments are true. But i like to point out is that timing is very important. If a very good movie is put on the screen ten years later I would lose my interest no matter what.

For the present movie I am simply urged to finish it, despite its technical drawbacks. And it is so happy to know some actors is the actual person in the incident.

In all, the movie is ok to me, and I hope more of this movie, like one on COVID 19, could be put on big screen timely.

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.

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.