This telling of the real-life ordeal surrounding 33 miners trapped in an underground Chilean gold and copper mine for 69 days is a crowded affair, both in terms of the sheer number of cast members and the various plotlines merging into one. But ultimately, THE 33 director Patricia Riggen (GIRL IN PROGRESS) does as strong a job directing traffic as she does creating a finished work that is an intense, claustrophobic, and highly emotional journey.
There's a bit of backstory that shows a number of the soon-to-be-trapped miners hanging out at a barbecue at one of their homes the day before the collapse. The spirit and jovial, slightly drunken, and it's clear that a bit part of what kept these men alive was a long-standing friendship and a belief that no one person was out just for himself.
It's established fairly quickly that the company that owns the mine was aware of safety issues and had no interest in fixing or even looking into any possible problems. So when the mine's entire infrastructure—which includes an extensive road system big enough for large mining vehicles to drive around, as well as offices—collapses, trapping all 33 miners (the fact that no one died in the collapse is astonishing to begin with), it's not exactly a surprise to the man in charge of safety, Don Lucho (Lou Diamond Phillips), who fought every day with the company to get improvements made.
It soon becomes clear that due to negligence, food and water supplies are drastically low, the ladders that are meant to go straight up to the top of the mine are only half built, and there is no means of communication with the world above. The decision is made to ration the food as best they can and hope that rescuers find them soon. With no real way of knowing the miners are alive, the paltry rescue mission involving sending a drill straight down toward the structure's safe room (where the miners actually are) and hoping it doesn't veer off course to such a degree that it misses the room. And it's not spoiling anything to say that, the room is found and at least food, water, air, and a means of talking to the miners can be arranged. And seeing as they're found in a matter of days, that doesn't exactly mean get rescued right away—not even close.
Riggen also spends a fair amount of time with some of the passionate family members to congregate outside the fence of the mining property waiting for any word from anyone. Among the more vocal in the crowd is Juliette Binoche's Maria Segovia, whose bother Dario (Juan Pablo Raba) is a drug addict, forced to go through a nasty bout of detox underground. Rodrigo Santoro portrays Laurence Golborne, who is that rarest of birds—the high-level government worker who actually has the best interests of the miners and their families in mind, and it is he who brings in the noted mine rescuer Andre Sougarret (Gabriel Bryne) and is better for it.
As the miners' time underground grows longer by weeks rather than days, an Ace in the Hole-style circus of souvenir sellers, media types and just the plain curious begin to descend on the small community, tracking the various rescue attempts, which seem to hinge on making a hole big enough for the miners to come out of. After a handful of failed attempts, a boring device (as in, a device that bores holes) brought in by the American Jeff Hart (James Brolin) seems to have the stuff to complete the work that other equipment simply failed to make happen.
If you go into THE 33 already knowing the fate of these miners, then you only know a fraction of the true story. The odds are you aren't aware of just how tense things got below the surface or above; how close the rescuers were to calling off the search initially; how deeply significant pressure from friends and families was in forcing the government's hand to finance a rescue; or how dangerous the actual extraction of the miners truly was. The film covers it all, and it does so pretty thoroughly and with a keen sense of uncovering the dramatic value giving everyone involved a voice. The greatest villain in the film isn't the mountain and all of its perils; it's bureaucracy and the laziness it inspires.
All credit due to director Riggen, who takes a film that is being described at "the one about the Chilean miners" and expanding the scope to tell so much more of the story to add drama to a tale whose ending is fairly well known. And she manages to do so without making the miners' story any less interesting or vital. The miners' fates are not the entirety of this journey, and the filmmakers make that clear and interesting.
