Watched all six episodes of Thailand's 2019 Thai Cave Rescue, a completely dramatized movie on the rescue of the 13 members of the Thai soccer youth team the Wild Boars from Tham Luang Cave in northernmost Thailand. Since it has more running time, it contains a lot more characters, details, and trivia than The Trapped 13: How We Survived the Thai Cave. While the latter is more concise, the former is able to fully showcase the dynamics between characters, and transforms the story into a drama with insightful depth and in multiple dimensions.

There was no attempt to make the actors look like their real-life counterparts. The actor who played the coach, for example, was a handsome young man who would have most likely abandoned rural Chiang Rai for Bangkok, thus creating a huge strain on my suspension of disbelief. The ensemble acting, however, was great, and all six episodes beautifully written and beautifully edited, all of these attributable to a director who clearly loved his subject matter.

Some of the actual timeline events seem to have been jumbled up as compared with those in The Trapped 13, such as the water pumps scenes and the death of the retired Thai Navy SEAL, to whom Episode 4 is entirely dedicated as tribute to a national hero. The action is swift; physical contact with the lost team is made as early as the end of Episode 2. While The Trapped 13 is more gripping because you saw the actual characters on the screen, Thai Cave Rescue is engrossing both as dramatized news coverage and as movie entertainment due to cleverly interspersed scenes between the stranded team, the boys' parents, the rescuers from England, Australia, Canada, the United States, Cyprus, Finland, Damascus, Germany, and Singapore, and the local officials. I found Episodes 5 and 6 most exciting, when the team members are actually transported underwater to safety.  

The presentation of the story in this movie is not chronological. It begins with a crucial point in the rescue operations, when the youngest team member, 11-year-old Titan, is being persuaded by a diver to leave the cave he is trapped in, and then flashes back to the day before the boys enter Tham Luang. 

This movie is also most admirable because it does not overlook the spiritual, Buddhist aspect. Like The Trapped 13 it includes the legend of the princess-goddess Chao Mae Nang Non plus a parable on death. On the whole, the message is that salvation is contingent on the gods and the goddesses, and it is usually the gods and the goddesses that are indigenous to one's own culture.

Quite interesting that "sabay-sabay" in Thai means "very easy".