Harrowing, ripped-from-the-headlines stories of survival are inherently cinematic. Extraordinary stories of heroic folks pulling together to save others, whether dozens of trapped miners, or in this case, a single diver hundreds of feet deep in the ocean… offer both the thrill of horror and faith in humanity in one film. We know that these movies can be more gut-churning than any fictional thriller (see films like Deepwater Horizon or Thirteen Lives or Apollo 13), but sometimes they drop the ball, like Last Breath.
Last Breath is a dramatic film based on the real-life freak accident and rescue of a pipeline deep-sea diver (an incident that director Alex Parkinson, along with Richard da Costa, tackled in a 2019 documentary of the same name). A young diver named Chris Lemons (Heath Ledger look-alike Finn Cole) ends up stuck over 300 feet down on the North Sea floor with no oxygen, disconnected from the diving bell when his literal lifeline tether (actually called an umbilical) snaps in a storm. His diving-bell teammates Dave (Simu Liu) and Duncan (Woody Harrelson) scramble to come up with a solution fast, while the ship that they themselves are tethered to careens wildly in 20-foot storm surges.
The whole incident in real time happened in about 40 minutes. But even at only 90 minutes, Last Breath feels like a story with a lot of padding. There’s a love story (Bobby Rainsbury gets saddled with the poorly developed fiancée role), there’s the “I’m the old guy on one last dive” subplot for Harrelson’s character, and Liu’s character is presented as staunch and serious, always at arm’s length… which just means he’s staunch and serious and always at arm’s length and we don’t really know anything about him.
What’s more interesting is the whole diving job itself. I would have loved more extrapolation (without dumbing it down) about what the heck was actually going on technically (as they apparently used real locations, real diving suits, etc.). The dive teams have to crawl into what look like giant foil-wrapped burritos the size of Airstreams for a month, keeping them protected in carefully pressure-controlled environments so they can dive safely. [I thought this was the actual diving tank, but the burrito actually stayed on the ship. So when the diving bell was presented, I had a, “Oh, I get it…” moment.] The tethers are actually coils of hoses feeding oxygen directly to the divers so they can stay on the ocean floor for hours… which also explains why they don’t have oxygen tanks (a-ha!). See? Interesting!
The best moments involve a remote control aquatic robot that serves as the eyes and sometimes hands of the ship above. When the crew uses it to find lost Chris in the darkness, the first glimpse of his flailing, oxygen-deprived body is truly a shocking moment. But somehow gasp-inducing moments like that are few and far between. The most moving part of the film is actually in the credits; a scene from a home movie of some of the characters’ real-life counterparts. It made me realize that this intriguing story has been watered down, leaving a limp dramatic thriller that makes you want to see the documentary instead.
