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The Rescue Movie Review

The Rescue is a 2021 documentary film directed by Elisabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. It has its problems, but it’s still a moving look into one of the most fascinating humanitarian efforts in recent memory.

Back in 2018, a junior football team got stuck in Tham Luang Non cave in Northern Thailand. What then followed was a huge multinational rescue mission that will put a smile on your face while seeing this movie as it represents the best that humanity is capable of. Where would all of us be if we were always behaving like that. It was truly beautiful to witness.

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I followed this news back in 2018, so I definitely had known the gist of it going into the movie, but I hadn’t known all of the bits and the movie insightfully depicts this entire search and rescue mission to the minutest of details. Some of this mission was executed in an overly blockbuster filmmaking manner, but still these scenes were immensely thrilling and entertaining to follow. It’s crazy what they had to do in order to safely transport these children out of this absolutely huge cave that was cleverly shown using digital mapping.

My issue with The Rescue stems from its production problems. Apparently, Netflix acquired the rights to tell the kids’ story while inside the cave, which resulted in this directorial team only managing to make a film about the rescuers. Whenever you make a documentary shown from one point of view, it’s not all-encompassing enough to be considered truly great. And in this instance I sorely missed that story as it was actually the most important one.

But the story that we got is still pretty strong. The movie mostly focused on just depicting what happened without really elevating it thematically speaking, but at least the story of these international rescuers was interesting. How they were given purpose in a seemingly overly dangerous and pointless profession was quite fascinating. The movie is also very well directed and these two have a better movie here than they had in ‘Free Solo’, but still it was a bit too long for my taste and one-sided. I also missed the Thai perspective in the film.

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Elisabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin have a better movie in The Rescue than what they had in the Oscar-winning Free Solo. This is an intense, engaging and fascinating movie that sheds light on one of the biggest and most inspirational humanitarian missions in recent history. The movie benefits from some incredible footage, terrific technical aspects and excellent stories from the rescuers themselves. But, because Netflix acquired the rights to tell the story of the trapped children, this movie was left without it, which was a serious issue as their story is the most important one and we basically got half of the story as a result.

My Rating – 4