[yasr_overall_rating]
Based on the real-life event, when a gold and copper mine collapses, it traps 33 miners underground for 69 days.
It can be difficult to articulate what separates a great film from the merely good, but I feel comfortable calling the “The 33” a good movie. The film is a recreation of true events from 2010, where 33 Chilean miners were trapped in the mine they were working in, and remained underground for almost three months. It’s a remarkable story, but one that’s occasionally undermined by an unfortunate impulse towards oversimplification, and a frustrating tendency to spoon feed emotional stakes to its audience.
“The 33” starts the day before the mine’s collapse, and ends with their triumphant rescue (I’d call this a spoiler, but the plot is beholden to real life, so the ending was really spoiled by intense media coverage from approximately five years ago). We begin by getting to know some of the miners. Antonio Banderas plays the charismatic Mario Sepúlveda, and Lou Diamond Phillips is the shift foreman, Luis “Don Lucho” Urzúa. We also become acquainted with father-to-be Álex Vega (played by Mario Casas), philandering Yonni Barrios (Oscar Nunez), and surly alcoholic Darío Segovia (Juan Pablo Raba). There are others, but with a scant two hours to spare, it’s hard to demand that “The 33” give all 33 men in the mine equal consideration. As much as the drama centers around the collapse itself, and the search for the lost miners, the story isn’t over when they’re found; finding men buried under several hundred meters of rock is an ordeal, but the task of freeing them proves to be even more daunting.
While the miners wait for their salvation, we watch the rescue efforts, led by the Minister of Mining, Laurence Golborne (Rodrigo Santoro), and civil engineer Andre Sougarret (Gabriel Byrne). We also see the family members of the trapped miners form a makeshift community, forged by shared dread and the need for support. The collapse is spectacular, and “The 33” does a great job depicting the vast and unforgiving landscape surrounding the San José Mine, where the men are trapped. Seeing the miners’ cramped spaces juxtaposed with the expanse of desert underscores how easily these men could have been lost, and forgotten, if not for their families’ refusal to let them be abandoned. We get a strong sense that the mining company itself would prefer they be forgotten, but unfortunately we never witness a comeuppance in response to their callous negligence (which, sadly, is true to what actually happened).
The events that inspired “The 33” are so incredible that filmmakers had all the raw material they needed to turn a remarkable story into a remarkable film. The biggest missteps happen when they lose faith in the power of that story, and try to insert superfluous drama into the plot. The breakdown of the miners’ backstories feels at times like canny triggers meant to probe audiences into a state of worry, including the reveal that one of the miners is two weeks from retirement (the retirement thing might have been culled directly from the real events, but “two weeks until retirement” has become stale even as a parody of tired storytelling convention). The deliberate manipulations end up feeling so calculated that they make it harder to invest in the story. Which is a shame, because when “The 33” isn’t getting in its own way, it’s powerful. The universal anxiety of being buried alive, and the impressive resilience the men display in adapting to their dire circumstances, are absolutely compelling without the insertion of personal dramas. Likewise, watching how the families of the men grieve, then fight for rescue efforts, is most affecting when we see them as a unit, not so much when we get borderline-mawkish reminders that a miner’s wife is expecting their first child, or that we’re supposed to be anxiously awaiting the reconciliation of a brother and sister.
“The 33” has a frustrating habit of inserting broad, crowd-pleasing moments that are distracting at best, and insulting at worst. This could have been a great film, but the deliberateness with which it tries to graft unnecessary plot points suggests that the people responsible either lacked faith in the story, or in audiences. It’s still a genuinely inspiring tale of human resilience, but “The 33” loses some of its captivating power in the transition from real life to the screen.
In theaters November 13th
