Avis des critiques

Hearing what went through [the divers'] minds when they crawled through this subterranean hell is fascinating. Even if you can remember the outcome, you'll find the finale tense and deeply moving.

The children don’t feature (having sold the rights to their story to Netflix), but the film’s directors, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, still have a good tale to tell. The interviews are candid and the first-hand footage is gripping.

Twenty-four-hour news coverage of the event is integrated seamlessly with footage filmed by locals and reconstructions starring the divers themselves. Vasarhelyi and Chin recreate the sense of the clock running down as oxygen levels in the cave decrease, while the monsoon outside rages.

The movie finds unexpected stardust in the British lead divers John Volanthen and Richard Stanton. The pair are quietly eccentric, thoughtful and ridiculously good at their job... But they are also sensitive and soft middle-aged men, and the emotional burden of the task is etched into their faces throughout, often becoming unbearably moving.

Even though the music gets very cheesy towards the end, it’s hard not to feel moved and so swept up that you haven’t time to wonder why none of the youngsters themselves are interviewed.

The Rescue, a moving and sometimes terrifying documentary about their incredible effort and the peril they faced, gives the British, Australian, and Chinese volunteers the credit they deserve.

[Chin and Vasarhelyi] are probably the best choice for a documentary like this, given the circumstances, and they do well with what they have. The question is, though, is what they have enough?

“The Rescue” isn’t just a movie about cave divers, or a recap of a well-reported humanitarian operation. It’s ultimately a film about the triumph of altruism, ingenuity and perseverance in the face of almost impossible odds, by the very people you might initially have dismissed as not up to the task. In short, as cliche as it sounds, it’s about the triumph not just of the nerd, but the human spirit.

It would be impossible not to be emotionally moved by this story, and in that way, “The Rescue” delivers. But between Vasarhelyi and Chin’s inability to speak with the boys or their families, and the documentary’s initially languid pacing, “The Rescue” feels like half a story told fairly well, but still, half a story.

“The Rescue” is a gripping, unsurprisingly moving early account, one that emphasizes the pluck and ingenuity of its heroes and the resilience and beauty of its survivors. To say that it feels necessarily incomplete is to acknowledge the extraordinary and extraordinarily multifaceted story it has to tell.

Vasarhelyi and Chin acquired a trove of original and archival footage, yet they don’t do anything exceptional with it. I couldn’t shake the feeling of watching a network TV documentary, designed to feed the audience with detail after detail, but not to generate any significant ideas from the facts and images it contains.

There’s a slickness to the storytelling in “The Rescue” that almost undermines its efficacy as a documentary... By the time “The Rescue” concludes with a rousing, overblown power ballad called “Believe,” you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d just seen the expensive blockbuster version of these events, tidily wrapped up in time for Oscar season.