Gripping

"The movie of the rescue was made by Ron Howard and is really sensitively made. Worth a watch if any of your readers haven't seen it. Unsworth deserves his MBE and more - the eternal gratitude of everyone who watched with bated breath for news of that rescue attempt." -  Tigger's Mum

It may seem astonishing to some "Yorkshire Pudding" visitors  but occasionally my blogposts are underpinned by online research.

See Tigger's Mum's comment above. I already knew about that film. It is called "Thirteen Lives" and I watched it this very evening. It is almost 2hrs and 30 mins long. We have access to Amazon Prime TV and I found the film there.

It makes no reference to the fellow that Bob in Camden, South Carolina has renamed Leon Skum. He didn't even get to be a footnote which was fine by me. Even Vernon Unsworth's role in the film is pretty small but he was the one who effectively made the rescue happen by urging the Thai authorities to fly in a group of experienced British cave divers.

The Thai Navy divers had been trained in sea diving. Obviously, wriggling through complicated pot hole systems is an entirely different proposition.

The cultural context of the drama took me back to my own time in Thailand. Effectively, I spent a total of eleven months living and working over there. With that experience in mind, I thought the film's Thai background was pretty authentic.

"Thirteen Lives" was in the end a feelgood film about human kindness, bravery and ingenuity - fighting to get those twelve boys and their young football coach out of the Tham Luang cave network before heavy monsoon rains made any prospect of rescue utterly impossible

Of course the ending is utterly joyous even though one of the Thai divers lost his life down there. 

It was great to watch a film that did not involve guns, murders, detectives or police enquiries. I was gripped by it. Perhaps you would enjoy it too if you can also access Amazon Prime.