Masculinity manifested through strength of purpose and a shared enterprise.

Readership: All
Theme: Honoring Fathers
Author’s Note: Written on 2023/7/6.
Length: 900 words
Reading Time: 4.5 minutes + 2:45 minute video

Thirteen Lives is a 2022 true life survival drama directed by Ron Howard (who also directed Cinderella Man) starring Viggo Mortensen, Colin Farrell, and Joel Edgerton.

The story begins in June 2018, when a boys’ soccer team in Thailand went to explore a cave with their coach.  Monsoon rains arrived unexpectedly and trapped the 12 boys and their coach in an air filled chamber deep in the mountain.

An international rescue effort quickly coalesced, racing against time and rising flood waters to rescue the boys and their coach, including Royal Thai Navy SEALS, American military, and expert cave divers from the UK and Australia.

I’m kind of cheating with this movie review, because only one of the main characters is shown to be a father (although many of them are in real life), and it’s not a central part of the story.  What I love about this movie is that it honors men, and fathers are men, so I hope the reader will cut me some slack.

The main themes I see here are love, mastery, and faith.

In the other movies I reviewed, love of family drives the plot.  In this story, love for one’s neighbor, and love for the stranger (ex-race / foreigners / out-group individuals who are regarded as a fellow man) drives the plot.

You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.

Leviticus 19:18 (NKJV)

The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

Leviticus 19:34 (NKJV)

Love for their neighbors drove thousands of Thai people to volunteer to do whatever they could to rescue the boys and their coach, and so did the love for the stranger.  Several of the boys, and their coach, were refugees from Myanmar.  The foreign boys’ families feared that the Thai people would decline to rescue their boys, but that’s not what happened.  Having never read Leviticus, the Buddhist people of Thailand loved their neighbors and the strangers among them as themselves in obedience to God’s law.

This is not an argument for Ecumenical / Unitarian claptrap, but a confirmation that God did in fact write His Law in all men’s hearts (Romans 2:15).  In fact, two of the Royal Thai Navy SEALS (Saman Kunan and Beirut Pakbara) died due to their efforts.

Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.

John 15:13 (NKJV)

The cave divers weren’t even Thai.

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That brings us to mastery.

Men used their expertise in a myriad of fields to assist.  The SEALS and cave divers are the focus of the movie, but we also see workers operating pumps to prevent the cave from filling with water.  A hydrologist enlists local men to divert water away from the mountain.  They run out of pipes, so a local farmer teaches them how to improvise pipes from bamboo.  Others set up tent kitchens to feed the thousands of volunteers.  Not every man’s contribution is as film-worthy as those of the SEALS or the cave divers, but take one piece out of that Jenga tower and the whole thing collapses.  Competence in useful skills is how men earn respect from each other, but these men went beyond competence to the realm of mastery.

That brings us to faith.

No matter how skillful these men were, they were all in over their heads.  The SEALS were master divers, but they were trained in open ocean diving, not cave diving.  Despite the best efforts of the hydrologist, his improvised team, and the pump operators, the cave was filling up anyway.  Worst of all, none of the boys had ever scuba dived.  Most couldn’t even swim.  And they were somehow supposed to make an extremely dangerous, supremely technical dive that took expert cave divers five hours each way and killed two Navy SEALS?  How?!

I had never heard of the solution these men devised until I watched the movie, and I assure you it is utterly insane.  I request that readers who know not spoil it for others, because it’s mind-blowing.  There was no reason to believe that it would work, and where reason proves inadequate, faith takes over.

Most movies these days portray men as stupid, evil, or both.  We know that’s a lie.  Most men are respectable, hardworking, and driven by love.  Because Thirteen Lives is based on a true story, it portrays men as they really are.  Better yet, it portrays men rising to a challenge no one could have foreseen under atrocious conditions.  I watched the movie with my entire family, and even my little kids enjoyed it.  It was easy for them to identify with the boys trapped in the cave, but it wasn’t too scary for them to watch.

You can find Thirteen Lives streaming for free (with a Prime membership) on Amazon Prime Video.

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