Movie Review: 'The 33'
By Bill Wine
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- We were gripped by the disaster when it happened and now we get to relive it on the movie screen.
The 33 is a suspense biodrama about the catastrophic explosion and collapse of a gold-and-copper mine shaft in Chile and the subsequent rescue attempt.
The century-old San Jose Mine collapsed in 2010, trapping 33 buried-alive miners 2300 feet (that's 200 stories or about half a mile) beneath the surface under 700 tons of rock for over two months, as a team of international rescuers worked night and day in a desperate attempt to get to the starving men, who had only three days of food available.
With so many miners, rescuers, and loved ones involved, character delineation is understandably handled rather sketchily. But in this particular case, where we're more wrapped up in the collective ordeal than the individual backstories, we accept the limitation.
Antonia Banderas plays a composite character but mostly Mario Sepulveda, nicknamed "Super Mario," the de facto leader of the miners, while the cast also includes Lou Diamond Phillips as the shift supervisor, Juliette Binoche as a sister of one of the miners, Gabriel Byrne as the chief engineer, and James Brolin as an American drilling expert.
The screenplay by Mikko Alanne, Craig Borten, and Michael Thomas, which is based on Hector Tobar's 2014 book, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mile, and the Miracle That Set Them Free, focuses – but lightly -- on ten individual story lines, several of them involving composite characters.
But the film is also based on survivors' testimony, which is incorporated into the narrative.
Mexican-born director Patricia Riggen (Under the Same Moon, Girl in Progress) delivers the CGI-assisted cave-in convincingly, then incorporates actual TV news footage to help remind us of the vigil that the worldwide audience of over a billion viewers kept at the time.
She creates a strong sense of place both in the mine and in the desert, where nervous families wait for word, signs of hope, or perhaps a miracle. And she manages to do that without yielding to obvious temptation and resorting to counterproductive emotional manipulation.
The director also examines the media circus that ensues and questions in no uncertain terms the mine owners' commitment to safety.
The one fantasy sequence Riggen includes, involving the miners' extreme hunger, seems at first to be ill-conceived and out of place, but it's gracefully integrated into the narrative so that, once we digest it, as it were, it makes sense and justifies its own existence.
The film is, it should be mentioned, in Spanish-accented English, which might make commercial sense but does not exactly enhance the film's credibility, although it's a minor annoyance that we get used to quickly.
Interestingly, our knowledge of the outcome does little to undermine the suspense generated, although it must be said that the film's climactic payoff comes nowhere near the emotional impact the actual event delivered to viewers watching it live on television.
Still, this honorable, solidly made film plays fair, stays out of its own way, and earns its tears.
So we'll rescue 3 stars out of 4 for the heartrending, claustrophobic, real-life survival drama, The 33, an inspiring tribute to human resourcefulness and perseverance.
