The six-part Netflix limited series Thai Cave Rescue doesn’t have it easy. How do you make the 18-day Tham Luang Nang Non ordeal captivating when the story of a dozen adolescent to teen soccer players and their coach trapped deep inside the flooded cave system has been told over and over?
Never mind the wall-to-wall media coverage during the incident and gruelling rescue operation just four years ago. There have already been three movies covering this terrain, including Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s documentary The Rescue and Ron Howard’s thrillingly restrained Thirteen Lives.
Thai Cave Rescue – with its amusingly basic title that seems engineered for the best SEO results – fares pretty well, despite the redundancies. Just make sure you watch it in the native Thai audio track with subtitles instead of the awkward English dub that the Netflix platform automatically reverts to.