If It Weren’t Based On a True Story, This Survival Thriller Would Be Totally Unbelievable
By Chris Catt
Last Breath tells the story of rescue mission at the bottom of the North Sea. It is a tense and hopeful film, but if it weren’t based on an actual event, it might be dismissed as too far-fetched and melodramatic.
Warning, there are major yet necessary spoilers for Last Breath in this article.
Establishing the Story
Last Breath stars Finn Cole as Chris Lemons, a saturation diver who repairs gas pipelines on the floor of the North Sea. To do their job, Chris and his fellow divers undergo a process that equalizes their body’s tissues with the pressure of the depth they’ll be diving at. This means they must stay inside pressurized enclosures for the duration of the job, which could last days or weeks. This also means that if something goes wrong, the divers are on their own since the saturation process takes time.
Chris is joined by team leader Duncan (played by Woody Harrelson) and experienced diver Dave (Simu Liu). Duncan is portrayed as something of a father figure for Chris. Duncan is protective of his crew, and he takes pride in his work. In contrast, Dave is gruff and standoffish. He is efficient and direct, and he keeps his emotions to himself. But when tragedy strikes, everyone comes together.
Tragedy Strikes
Dave and Chris dive while Duncan maintains their essential umbilical lines from a nearby diving bell. The diving bell is attached to a ship above, and when a storm pushes the ship off course, Dave and Chris are in danger of being dragged behind. Dave makes it back to the safety of the diving bell, but Chris’s umbilical snaps, leaving him stranded at the bottom of the sea with no heat and only minutes of back-up oxygen.
Duncan refuses to leave Chris behind. He believes Chris can be saved despite the time it’s taking for the ship to get back into position so Dave can dive and bring Chris back. Even Dave, who at first thinks he’ll be diving to retrieve a dead body, starts to believe in the rescue mission. This is where Last Breath might start receiving eye rolls from the audience if we didn’t know that it is based on a true story.
It’s Too Perfect to Explain
The rescue of Chris Lemons involves numerous unlikely events that have to go exactly right in order for him to survive. The ship’s automated navigation system fails, so the ship must be manually steered back towards its original location through a raging storm. No problem. The navigation system takes a long time to reboot, but a single crewman thinks he can bypass the reboot by switching around a complicated mess of cables. Easy. Chris must be found and carried back up to the diving bell which is being tossed around by its connection to the ship above. Totally doable. The movie makes it all seem so easy (relatively speaking).
And then there’s the biggest moment of unbelievability. [Last spoiler warning!] When Chris is brought into the diving bell, he’s been without oxygen for about 30 minutes. His skin is blue, but a few moments after Duncan administers CPR, Chris wakes up. The color returns to his skin, and in the few days it takes for the crew to be depressurized, he is completely fine. No further medical attention is shown, and we are told he suffered no brain damage. At all. If Last Breath were a fictional film, it would be too much of a stretch to be entertaining. But it’s not fictional. That’s what actually happened to the real Chris Lemons.
What to Make of It All
When a narrative film comes across as completely improbable, and the only explanations we are shown amount to “nobody knows how, but it happened,” how are we supposed to feel about the movie? Many people might dismiss it as too corny. A melodrama disguised as a feel-good survival thriller. But knowing that it actually happened, and being told that it’s based on a true story during the opening credits? I don’t know how I feel about it.
It is an amazing story. Of that, there is no doubt. It’s a story that people should know, but it’s also a story that might be better experienced as a documentary. I haven’t had the chance to see the documentary yet (also titled Last Breath), but I imagine that hearing the story from the actual people who went through it would be more effective than a well-made yet far-fetched narrative film.
Don’t get me wrong, the cast is great, and the underwater sequences are compelling. I just couldn’t help but be underwhelmed by the drama of the film since I had a pretty good idea that everything would work out okay in the end. Why would they tell this true story if it ended in tragedy? For me, that made the drama less dramatic, and the tension less tense. When you already know how a story will end, the emotional journey is the most compelling part. Last Breath focuses more on plot than emotions, and that’s its biggest shortcoming. I still enjoyed Last Breath, but it really just made me want to read about the true story and watch the documentary.
