User reviews

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.

The last count is FOUR. Four movies about the same subject released close together. And this one is even worse than the Ron Howard movie. Better watch the one and only truly riveting version and that is the documentary from National Geographic called "The Rescue". All these other movies just do not do real justice to this real life drama.

Mind you, this is not a bad movie, not at all, but why watch something inferior when a much better version is readily available?

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.

IN A NUTSHELL: Four separate movies been released almost simultaneously about this story. It's a fascinating story because it's true. A boys' soccer team was trapped in the Tham Luang cave by rising floodwaters in Thailand in 2018. There's Cave Rescue by Tom Waller and Lionsgate, Ron Howard's Thirteen Lives on Amazon Prime, a National Geographic documentary called The Rescue that was nominated for an Oscar, and a Netflix limited series called Thai Cave Rescue. More than 5000 people from 17 countries participated in the real-life rescue.

THINGS I LIKED: In all of them, we get to travel to beautiful Thailand.

Thirteen Lives gives us time to get to know some of the rescuers a little bit better.

It's fun to see the food, homes, and religious culture illustrated in all of them.

In all of the films, we get to learn and watch various rescue techniques that were used to try to save the boys.

We get to see how the world came together to rescue the boys.

While Thirteen Lives was a big Hollywood production with elaborate sets and soundstages, Cave Rescue was actually filmed in Thailand near the actual locations where the events occurred. Rescue diver Jim Warny plays himself in that version.

I adore Viggo Mortensen, so that persuaded me to favor the Thirteen Lives version by Academy Award-winning director Ron Howard. Viggo Mortensen speaks multiple languages, and apparently, he's also a fix-it guy, volunteering to fix equipment rather than wait for the crew. Also in that movie are Colin Farrell and Joel Edgerton. They all speak with accents and are absolutely fantastic.

It's fun to hear Thai being spoken. We also hear Chinese and English. In Cave Rescue, we also hear French and Spanish.

Ron Howard's film utilized over a thousand people to portray all of the action!

Even though we know the outcome of the story (if you paid attention to the news when this was happening in real life), all movies do a good job of building tension and suspense.

In both Thirteen Lives and Cave Rescue, we're shown a map of the cave and a time counter that tells us where the divers are and how much time has passed since the rescue operations began.

The cinematography by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom in Thirteen Lives does an excellent job of making us hold our breath and gasp for air. In reality, the water would have been extremely muddy with terrible visibility.

Many of the actors in the movie Cave Rescue were the people in real life who experienced the ordeal.

So much for superheroes...these rescue workers are the real deal.

There's a super sweet scene in Thirteen Lives that really touched me. It's when two of the divers first found the boys. The first thing the boys said was "Thank you." They were so humble and affirmed that they loved their coach, even though he felt terrible for getting the boys into dangerous trouble. They explained that the coach taught them how to meditate and be calm. I just wanted to hug the boys and was so emotional watching these films!

The boys went so long without food, which is possible, so I wondered how they were getting water. For a split second in the movie Thirteen Lives, we see one of the young boys opening his mouth to get drips of water from the cave wall. Wow.

At the end of Cave Rescue, we get to see video footage of the real people who experienced the events.

THINGS I DIDN'T LIKE: In both Thirteen Lives and Cave Rescue, we don't get to see how the boys got stuck in the cave. Instead, we see the boys wander near a cave and then, suddenly, rescue workers are seen swarming the area. We don't get to see how the boys survived for so long.

In Cave Rescue, a lot more Thai is spoken, often without subtitles. There are also a lot of title cards that you have to read that let you know what's going on. You have to read fast because they don't stay on the screen very long. I also felt like some details were missing in this version that made it harder to understand what was going on than in Thirteen Lives.

TIPS FOR PARENTS: There is a lot of reading text in all four movies.

Boys are in a dangerous situation.

Talk of death Someone drowns.

In Cave Rescue, there is an F-bomb.

THEMES: Humanity The value of life Teamwork Thinking outside the box Hope Family Innocence Mother Nature Heroism.

Twelve young boys and their coach being trapped in a cave - it was world news for about 3 weeks. When the movie comes you expect to get something more out of it than an overview of the news headlines and a presentation of facts you already know. I would have expect some more insight of what the impact was on the team, but the boys themselves get no more than 10 minutes or so screening time. What is it like to find out that you are trapped in a cave. How do you deal with the darkness, dampness, lack of food, fresh water and sanitary facilities? How do you cope with being cut off from the outside world not knowing what efforts are being made there and how long it will take before someone finds you? This film makes you none the wiser. Instead the focus is on some guy arranging pumps, and else I could hardly make out a story line. On top of this the cinematography is exhausting. Hand held camera most of the time in very close up producing images on the big screen that are constantly moving are no pleasure to watch. This film adds nothing to anything and is a waste of time. My four stars are on the generous side.

This movie is EXACTLY the same story as another movie called "Thirteen Lives" which is free to watch on Amazon. It is a really good movie but if you're going to watch it, why pay for it when you can watch it for free.

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.

This film is not perfect. It's not as cinematic as the Ron Howard movie, it's somewhat 'slow' for our standards, but I still think it's worth watching and I enjoyed it.

It's like a crossover between documentary and fiction. This film focuses mainly on the efforts that surrounded the four lead British divers rather than that group itself. A lot of room is given to the Thai people, to the support divers, to the logistics.

The story is definitely not told with an epic tone, but has a rather realistic hue to it. If you're interested in the story, and you've already seen The Rescue and Thirteen Lives, I think this is a nice addiction. It gives you bits and pieces of extra information. It works better after watching those two, rather than as stand alone film.

Many Thais rejected this movie after discovering the producer and director change the actual story. Most of the decision making on rescuing the kids in the cave were made by Thai authorities, but the movie shows that foreigners decide the rescue.

Many local people watch movie in the the cinema and just walk out from the theatre after 20 - 30 mins and unhappy with the scene.

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.

Someone recently said this was an awful firm about a really heartwarming story. Unfortunately, this firm goes even further that that - it is worse than awful. Avoid this like the plague it is. If you really want to see the story, check out the Discovery Channel short about it - MUCH better.

Saw this at Bangkok Screening Room, February 2020.

It was really not so good. Uneven pacing, poor cinematography (especially in the cave), zero character development resulting in no emotional investment from the viewer. The boys and the coach are one-dimensional stick figures with practically no dialogue.

The cast was a mix of professional actors and actual people who were on the scene of the event playing themselves, which sounds all right in theory but resulted in some laughably bad acting. Real actors should have been used for the entire film.

The film was produced in a short time frame immediately after the events actually took place, which might explain some of the bad choices made during production and make them almost forgivable, and the set design and production looked realistic enough-I think it was filmed on-site-so I give the film 3 stars for effort.

But don't waste your time. Just watch some clips of the real thing from YouTube.

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.

Bad in everythings about movie. Directing ,scripts, acting, cutting etc . Even order situations the team can't do. I cant stand to watch to the end.

I was familiar with the events that took place back in Thailand with the boys trapped in the cave, but I didn't know that they opted to cash in on this event and make a movie out of it. So as I stumbled upon the 2022 drama "Cave Rescue" from writers Katrina Grose, Don Linder and Tom Waller, I opted to sit down and watch the movie.

Sure, "Cave Rescue" is a watchable movie, and it is actually an adequately enough watchable movie. However, knowing the result of the actual rescue situation, then "Cave Rescue" was somewhat of a redundant movie, as you already know the outcome of the story.

I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble in the movie, but they did put on good enough performances for a movie of this type.

I am sure that there is an audience out there for a movie based on real life events such as "Cave Rescue". However, I just found the movie somewhat unnecessary. And while I managed to sit through the entire movie, then I can in all honesty say that this movie is not something I will ever return to watch a second time. The movie just simply doesn't have the contents to support more than a single viewing.

My rating of "Cave Rescue" lands on a four out of ten stars.

What a bad movie. Very amateurish, with generic dialogue and music. The drama is non-existent so the whole thing is flat and boring. The boys are hardly shown in the cave and don't even seem that bothered by their ordeal, so that as a viewer I didn't care much about them. After three days inside they are just a bit thirsty. Okay.

Local authorities did not like this film because the author wanted to tell the truth about some facts that actually happened. To do this, the director even used the same people as witnesses to the facts that actually happened. Nonetheless, the director was accused of telling the fake, obviously by the culprits. I hope this film will serve as an example for other Thai directors in the future. Freedom in the creative process must not be tied in any way, especially in a historical moment like this where there are people who are paying only for having said the pure truth.

The original documentary was all we needed about this rescue. Don't get me wrong, its nice to know people are trying to tell this story around, but... just last week I've also watched Ron Howard's version of the same rescue.

Was this just a ripoff, like The Asylum tends to do with blockbuster movies?

I particulary do not recommend this one, specially after watching Ron Howard's high-budget version.