It’s distressing — and far too simple — to imagine a terrible version of Thirteen Lives.
This imaginary, overly Hollywoodized version, scored to nonstop swoony music, would center on a middle-aged English cave diver, one of the volunteers who flew to northern Thailand in 2018 to help rescue a dozen young soccer players and their coach from the Tham Luang cave. We’d get a great deal of his backstory before we dove into the action. His motivation would be laboriously constructed through some kind of flashback to his own soccer-loving youth. We’d spend several scenes with his estranged wife and child, both of whom he loves but doesn’t see enough. (This would all be heightened to make sure the audience knew the real stakes of the operation.) All of the Thai characters would go unnamed, props supporting the Englishman’s archetypal hero’s journey. And in the end, the…
