Thirteen Lives

How accurate is 'Thirteen Lives,' Ron Howard's new movie about the Thai cave rescue of a boys' soccer team and their coach? We fact check the film.

And then the anesthetic was ketamine, and it was a lot. ("I reckon you did the hardest part," Harry tells him. Although Ploy's character is a composite of many parents, the bracelets themselves were real: "That was a wonderful discovery," Nicholson says. It's true that "the parents never knew," Nicholson says. Before the rescue gets underway, a trapped boy's mother (Pattrakorn "Ploy" Tungsupakul) gives Rick and John a bag of red beaded bracelets for good luck. Although it was initially just referenced in the script, Howard says he wanted "an opportunity to see this meditation."

The movie is inspired by the real-life rescue of 13 people who were trapped in a cave in Thailand. You can stream "Thirteen Lives" on Prime Video.

If you buy them, we may get a small share of the revenue from the sale from our partners. You can find a list of supported devices and televisions on the Amazon website. Prime Video is also included as part of a full Amazon Prime membership for $15 a month. Twelve children and their soccer coach were trapped over two miles deep in the Tham Luang cave system in Thailand. However, that free trial period is a one-time deal, and if you don't cancel when the 30 days are up, you'll be looped into the monthly rate. You can sign up for Prime Video as a standalone streaming service for $9 a month.

Thirteen Lives stars Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen as two of the heroic divers. Is it accurate?

The tunnels are so murky that even with headlamps, the only way the rescue divers can find their way out and not get lost in the cave network is by keeping hold of a guide rope installed before the boys are swum out from Cavern 9. It was in fact the Thai military who called in Thanet Natisri (Nophand Boonyai), a Thai restaurant owner and self-taught groundwater storage expert from Marion, Illinois who happened to be working on a project in Thailand building wells for farmers. With the attempt to reach the boys suspended because of the constantly-rising water level, a Thai-American water engineer points out that unless the water pouring in from above is diverted, the divers will never be able to get in. In fact, hundreds of rescuers formed a ‘daisy chain’ to slide, carry, and even zipline the boys on stretchers over a complex network of pulleys previously installed by rock-climbers (also not shown). Some stretchers were placed on an impromptu slide made of hoses installed to pump out water. The two British experts were indeed the first to navigate the difficult narrow tunnels past Cavern 3 and find the boys alive in Cavern 9, and they did bring on two more British divers plus Harris. However, possibly in the name of not overwhelming the audience with more characters than they can possibly keep track of, the film has omitted from the core team another Australian and another lead diver, Jim Warny from Ireland, who joined on the final day of the rescue. They bring the “packages,” anesthetized boys in wetsuits and scuba gear on light stretchers with hands and feet restrained, to a staging area in Cavern 3, where the stretchers are guided through the rest of the network to the cave entrance by a team of Thai SEALS and divers. Also not shown are the 90 Thai divers and the foreign dive shop owners who were stationed along the route to perform medical check-ups and resupply air-tanks for the main divers, and the team who installed the oxygen tanks, cables, lighting system, communication devices, and the water drainage pipes and pumping system used to drain water from the tunnels. In the film, the mother of one of the boys tells the assistant to the area’s governor, Narongsak Osatanakorn (Sahajak Boonthanakit), that her family is from Myanmar and so don’t have any official ID cards. The film’s version of the rescue itself shows only the four British cave dive experts guiding each unconscious boy (one diver per boy) between Caverns 9 and 3 over the course of three days. The film depicts about 20 Thai Navy SEALS beginning the rescue operation, but, trained for open water diving and not work in narrow cave tunnels, they can only get about halfway down the tunnel network to Cavern 3. The confusion may arise from the fact that all four were from the ethnic minority hill tribes that populate both sides of the porous border in the notorious Golden Triangle, a hotbed of drug smuggling, between Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos, where Thai authorities estimate the “stateless” population with no documented nationality may be as high as three million. The bad news: The story was covered so exhaustively at the time that much of the core audience is already familiar with all the details and will notice any fudging for dramatic effect.

The perilous journey of a junior soccer team trapped in a cave by floodwaters captured the world's attention in 2018 and is the focus of this new film by ...

When Howard sticks to the action beats, Thirteen Lives is satisfying. It's a six-hour-plus dive from the cave where they're marooned and back to safety, a journey that wends its way through treacherous underwater tunnels that only a skilled diver could possibly navigate. "I didn't come here to kill kids, Rick," Harris protests, a line of dialogue that yields the movie's biggest unintentional laugh.