Slashfilm

Thirteen Lives is a film that truly orients itself around a grounded cinematic approach to story, one largely told without big, grandstanding emotional speeches but instead focused on visually capturing subjectivity, demonstrating tension, and highlighting the life-or-death weight of the characters' choices.utm_campaign=clip

Slashfilm by Jeff Ewing

Thirteen Lives is a film that truly orients itself around a grounded cinematic approach to story, one largely told without big, grandstanding emotional speeches but instead focused on visually capturing subjectivity, demonstrating tension, and highlighting the life-or-death weight of the characters' choices.utm_campaign=clip

Observer by Rex Reed

As scripted, documentary-style fact-based dramas go, it doesn’t get much better than this.

The Playlist by Simon Thompson

Thirteen Lives is not an exhibition of spectacle in scale or execution. It neither skirts over details too quickly nor goes too deep into technical aspects, arming the audience with enough to know how much is at stake and why. It’s an examination and dramatization of adversity and the complexity, strength, and resilience of the human spirit, which perfectly draws characterizations that avoid hammy tropes and tired stereotypes.

The Telegraph by Robbie Collin

Howard’s film is a paean to the courage and canniness of the seasoned non-professional: subterranean heroism has never looked so down-to-earth.

The Irish Times by Donald Clarke

We are left with a properly entertaining drama that gets across the technical details with great efficiency. A good job of work by a reliable Hollywood professional.

The Observer (UK) by Wendy Ide

Despite the fact that we all know the outcome, and that it’s the third film in as many years to tell the story, Ron Howard’s account of the drama is compulsively watchable and breathlessly tense.

Time by Stephanie Zacharek

Luckily, we have the benefit of being able to read the future even as we watch Thirteen Lives, and that leaves us free to enjoy Howard’s crackerjack storytelling skills, not to mention the picture’s bracing, casually heroic lead performances.

IGN by Tara Bennett

In Thirteen Lives, Ron Howard sheds the spectacle of the 2018 Thai soccer team cave rescue by recreating the impossible logistics, choices, and dangers with intimacy and chilling claustrophobia.

Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer

A story of overwhelming humanitarian sacrifice.

Austin Chronicle by Richard Whittaker

All too often, in life and in cinema, systems are shown as working simply to oppress: Thirteen Lives reminds us that communal acts can be what literally save us.

Consequence

The film is a welcome return to form for Howard, containing all the makings of a competently crafted crowd-pleasing drama.

TheWrap by William Bibbiani

Although it’s extremely competent, it fails to add a new perspective to the story, or a distinctive approach to its telling.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Barry Hertz

When Howard focuses on the head-scratching mechanics of the mission itself, Thirteen Lives excels – and its many claustrophobic underwater scenes likely play excellently inside the confines of a darkened theatre. But by the time we’re in pure rescue mode, it is almost too late. What should be the highest of high-stakes dramas arrives with a drippy thud.

The Hollywood Reporter by Lovia Gyarkye

It’s a restrained rendering of the events, a drama that plays, at times, like a documentary. But if Howard’s decision to spotlight the Thai characters in this harrowing narrative is a sound one, there’s an unfamiliar stiffness and self-consciousness in the director’s approach — an inability to marry the fast-paced, no-nonsense heroics that are his strong suit with more emotionally textured storytelling. The resulting awkwardness prevents the movie, for all the surreal tension and bravery it depicts, from feeling urgent or surprising.

Empire by Ian Freer

For its first half, Thirteen Lives feels like it is treading water, waiting for its big final act. Thankfully, the second half is a riveting depiction of a daring, foolhardy, inspired rescue.

Time Out by Trevor Johnston

You can appreciate the effort, but this falls just short of doing justice to the emotional stakes and claustrophobic terror of the traumatic events themselves.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

[A] decent retelling of an amazing true-life story.

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

Told with no frills, less personality, and just enough quiet dignity to sustain itself for 18 days (or 147 minutes), Howard’s serviceable “Thirteen Lives” is a far cry from the kind of souped-up spectacle some of his Hollywood contemporaries might create out of this material. And yet, its let the story speak for itself approach feels misjudged in the aftermath of a documentary so rich with big personalities, knotted with stomach-churning suspense, and shadowed by a lingering sense of ethical ambivalence.