Amazon has released the first trailer for its upcoming drama Thirteen Lives. The tense trailer sets up a gripping narrative based on the real-life events of the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue, which documents the rescue of twelve junior soccer players and their coach from a cave system in Thailand.
The rescue drama is directed by Ron Howard and features an impressive assembly of A-list talent, including Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell as British cave divers William Stanton and John Volanthen, Joel Edgerton as anesthetist Richard Harris, and Vithaya Pansringarm as Thai General Anupong Paochinda.
In June of 2018, twelve boys aged between 11 and 16, all members of the local Wild Boars junior football team, and their 25-year-old assistant coach were reported missing after a planned trip to the Tham Luang cave in Chiang Rai Province in northern Thailand. Although the cave was a tourist attraction, floodwaters trapped the team in the cave in a location that made extraction seem almost untenable. The team was eventually rescued by an international team of experts, including Stanton and Volanthen, who were the first to locate the children and their coach.
The trailer opens with the team above ground, shortly before their fateful trip into the cave. We then see Mortensen and Farrell discussing the intricacies of the cave and how it is deceptively simple-looking though seemingly impossible to navigate safely when flooded. We see the discovery of the boys and then the swell of international concern as their situation and the nigh-impossibility of their rescue becomes known to the world.
Thirteen Lives will debut in select theaters on July 29 before it becomes available to stream on Aug. 5 on Prime Video.