By Michael O’Sullivan, The Washington Post
In September 2012, while attempting to repair an oil pipeline off the coast of Scotland, the diving support ship Bibby Topaz lost control of the automated system of thrusters that held it in place above the repair crew. Buffeted by winds and swells, the ship began to drift away from the divers, 300 feet below on the ocean floor.
Suddenly, one of those divers, Chris Lemons, found his lifeline to the vessel – aptly known as an umbilical, providing hot water, electricity and oxygen – snagged on a piece of equipment, leaving him effectively a human anchor. The line snapped, and Lemons was stranded with only a few minutes left of reserve oxygen as the Topaz pulled away. Fellow divers Dave Yuasa and Duncan Allcock, the latter supervising repairs from a submersible known as a bell, were still tethered to the receding ship.
Following up on an excellent 2019 feature documentary made about the incident (and, before that, a short industrial film commissioned in 2013), the thriller “Last Breath” dramatizes this true story, in serviceably taut fashion, with Finn Cole, Simu Liu and Woody Harrelson playing Lemons, Yuasa and Allcock. A survival drama about practitioners of a highly specialized skill who willingly submit to the routine risk of death, it centers on characters who evoke the real-life British divers who led the 2018 rescue of a Thai soccer team trapped in a flooded cave, as well as such mountain climbing daredevils as Alex Honnold and Marc-André Leclerc, all of whom have also had movies made about them – and for good reason: They’re all a little odd, even apart from how they spend their time. (Allcock, for instance, eats one candy bar every day.)
With so much already known about Lemons’s story, which is, to put it mildly, remarkable, it’s tough to talk about “Last Breath” without spoilers.
But it’s easy to see why filmmaker Alex Parkinson, who also co-directed the 2019 documentary with Richard da Costa, would want to turn his nonfiction film into a narrative feature. The rescue story involves intense drama, along with themes of human will, perseverance and teamwork. It’s a story made for the big screen, although its parameters are, paradoxically, rather small. When it comes down to it, it’s about nothing more than people doing their jobs, as Yuasa noted in the documentary and as Liu’s Dave drily observes here.
Although the new film fleshes out – and sometimes seems to invent – details that the 2019 film did not include, “Last Breath” is a mostly faithful retelling, with much of it, by necessity, devoted to the intricacies of saturation diving, or sat diving, the specialized version of their profession practiced here.
Sat diving entails weeks-long isolation in sealed and pressurized pods, where the divers prep for upcoming jobs by breathing a mixture of oxygen and helium, called heliox, under artificial pressure meant to mimic the increased pressure of working hundreds of feet underwater. As long as they are diving, traveling to and from the dive site in the bell, or living in the trailer-size pods aboard ship, they will avoid the bends, a painful form of decompression sickness that is caused by surfacing too quickly.
Much of the first half of the film is devoted to getting all this exposition out of the way, as it introduces us to the characters: the avuncular good ol’ boy Duncan, nicknamed Sat Daddy, who is about to retire; boyish Chris, engaged to be married to his sweetheart (Bobby Rainsbury); and Dave, known as the Vulcan for his preternatural ability to shut down his emotions.
Liu only slightly tempers this aspect of the real-life character, although in the documentary Yuasa makes it clear, without apology, that he just doesn’t feel things like other people. That came across as unnerving at times in the 2019 film. For Liu’s character, it’s more of a wry, Spock-like quirk. But in that regard, Dave’s no different from climbers Honnold and Leclerc, or the Thai cave rescue team featured in Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Vasarhelyi’s “The Rescue,” who also appear to be wired a little differently from most people. That documentary, later adapted as a pretty decent thriller by Ron Howard, remains the gold standard for the nonfiction survival film genre.
Yet as effective and gripping as “Last Breath” may be, it’s not exactly essential viewing. You have to have a taste for sickening suspense, for one thing.
That’s no flaw of the filmmaking, which lays out the narrative and its stakes clearly and concisely. It knows when to elide the truth, too: Some factual details get omitted, such as that heliox makes divers sound like the cartoon chipmunks Alvin, Simon and Theodore. Even a few minutes of that, in this film, would have been distracting. (The documentary resorts to subtitles.)
Much like its characters, “Last Breath” simply goes about getting the job done, without fuss or fanfare. Maybe no higher praise is necessary.
RATING: **1/2 OUT OF FOUR