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Wedel nearly perfects the tough balancing act that comes with constructing a documentary: Crafting something that is at once beautifully stylized, but doesn’t distract from the truth at hand. Similarly, as the boys recount the moment that they came to terms with the reality that no help was coming, it’s hard not to feel like you’re crouched right beside them within those jagged walls.īut the compelling nature of Trapped 13 isn’t just a product of its raw, chilling testimonies. “I wanted to show them something beautiful,” he says. It’s difficult not to catch a lump in your throat when Eak expresses a sense of responsibility for bringing them into the cave in the first place.
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Later, when faced with near-lethal levels of starvation, they describe daydreaming that they were able to convince a delivery person to swim through the winding networks of the cavern to deliver them fresh baskets of crispy chicken.Īs heartbreaking as you expect the gory details of the boys’ time in the cave to be, they are a thousand times more so. Instead of recalling any sense of impending doom as they first entered the cave’s mouth, for example, the boys giggle as they remember teasing one of their teammates for having a girlfriend. Their recollections of the event are consistently moving, funny and surprising. If nothing else, Trapped 13 emphasizes that, without a doubt, the most important perspectives in the story of the Tham Luang cave rescue are those of the boys. Helmed by Thai director Pailin Wedel, the documentary features exclusive testimony from six of the boys-Tee, Titan, Tle, Adul, Mark, Mix-and their coach, Eak.
#Jenka cave story series
The Trapped 13: How We Survived the Thai Cave is part of the streaming giant’s Thai Cave Rescue collection, which also features a scripted limited series called Thai Cave Rescue. Not long after the incident took place, Netflix locked down exclusive rights to the boys’ stories, making it so every other take on the event-even Howard’s $55 million dollar endeavor-had to almost entirely circumvent any depiction of the victims.Īnd so, after four long years, we finally get to see what Netflix has been keeping under its hat for all this time. But all of these on-screen endeavors are missing one crucial component: The perspective of the survivors.
#Jenka cave story free
To merely scratch the surface, there was the 2019 film The Cave, there was The Rescue ( Free Solo directing team Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s NatGeo-produced doc) and, most recently, there was Thirteen Lives, director Ron Howard’s big-budget, star-studded dramatization of the perilous rescue mission.
#Jenka cave story tv
In the four years since 13 young boys on the Wild Boars soccer team became trapped in a flooded cave for 18 world-captivating days, there have been no shortage of film and TV adaptations of the incident.
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