Antonio Banderas’ Chilean miner movie is a great story, poorly told.
By Josh Lasser
Phrases like “right out of a Hollywood movie” and “Hollywood couldn’t have scripted it any better” are regularly used when discussing events around the world. Is it any wonder then that Hollywood takes some of those perfectly scripted events and turns them into movies?
With The 33, the story of 33 miners stuck for more than two months underground in Chile, that is exactly what has happened. Author Hector Tobar wrote a book about the 2010 event, and director Patricia Riggen has made a film based upon that book.
It is, seemingly, all there. There are interesting backstories for some of the miners – there’s the one who has a drinking problem, there’s the one who has a mistress, there’s the one who is getting ready to retire, there’s the one who likes to impersonate Elvis. There is horror at the mine collapsing on these men and their being stuck in a place where the ladders were never finished, where the first aid station was never fully equipped, where the emergency food locker is mostly empty. There are the tireless people on the surface, the ones who never lose hope and the ones who keep drilling to find the miners. There is also the widely reported happy ending, where all 33 miners make it out alive.
The 33 then could have it all. The story seems ripe for the plucking. As a film, however, it does not succeed.
Without a doubt, The 33 hits the required emotional highs and lows, and Riggen does a great job with the mine collapse itself. She also gets some enjoyable performances from Antonio Banderas, Lou Diamond Phillips, and Oscar Nuñez. But, that’s about it.
We want to hear it.
One of the chief tasks of The 33 is to explain just how these guys were rescued. The movie, in fact, spends a lot of time on it. What it never does though is actually explain it. Words are bandied about by Mining Minister Laurence Golborne (Rodrigo Santoro) and the engineer in charge of drilling, Andre Sougarret (Gabriel Byrne), but an actual explanation of what takes place to find them is lacking. When a turn comes and they finally work out how to get to the miners, what little explanation is provided feels laughable, particularly as it comes from Golborne, whom the audience is told knows little about what he’s doing, not Sougarret.
Eventually, The 33 is able to hand off any and all explaining of the process to television news clips. While these clips do add a level of realism to the film, there is an almost audible sigh by the movie itself that someone else can now do the heavy lifting.
Golborne himself, as a character, does not work either. As Mining Minister, he convinces the Chilean President (Bob Gunton) that the government should be present at the location and help the miners. Golborne goes to the mine to do this, promises the exceptionally skeptical local families that the government will do everything they can, has a two-minute meeting with the head of the mine, and then tells the families that there is nothing that can be done. He is then, naturally, convinced to try to help again. Over the course of just a few minutes of film time, he goes from being a staunch supporter of a rescue operation to being convinced of its impossibility to supporting it once more. The purpose of the turn is, presumably, to show how much the families care about the miners, but the result is a wholly unrealistic presentation.
Filmed on location in mines in Colombia, the backdrop The 33 offers inside the mine is realistic and vaguely terrifying. What doesn’t come across, and what the movie has to tell the audience more than once, is that it is exceptionally hot that far down. At one point, it is said that it is 100 degrees where the men are stranded, but it certainly does not look it.
There is also a scene in which the miners hallucinate about their situation. They all dream about the foods they would like to be eating instead of what they have at their disposal. Perhaps though it isn’t a hallucination; perhaps it is them talking about it. However, The 33 comes out of the moment to pure silence. There is nothing that broke the hallucination, nothing that crept in to end it. It merely starts for no reason, involves everyone, and then stops for no reason. The audience is just left to assume that there must be something wrong with the tuna.
No amount of real world stakes, nor the accompanying emotional highs and lows, can overcome these other deficits in the storytelling.
Punctuated by overly lyrical dialogue — particularly the bits given to Antonio Banderas’ Mario Sepúlveda who talks of things like the heart of the mountain breaking — The 33 is never able to make the most of what ought to be an engrossing story. The film gets the easy parts right, it conveys the horror of the situation, but it fails to do much beyond that, making this great real world triumph a middling filmic disappointment.
