Last Breath

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

[mr_rating_result]

The opening of the original Netflix documentary tells us “This is a true story.” It happened on September 18, 2012, in the North Sea – a diver gets trapped on the bottom of the sea with five minutes of air left and no chance of rescue.

You’d think the doc would only be five minutes long, but – no – “Last Breath” runs a full one hour and 30 minutes. What’s more, it has now been remade as a feature film starring Woody Harrelson that’s actually three minutes longer.

The new movie – also called “Last Breath” – is playing in theaters this week.

But before we look at this feature film remake, let’s examine the underlying true story.

Due to a diving team’s support vessel, Bibby Topaz, getting caught in rough seas, a diver named Chris Lemons experienced a severed umbilical cable, leaving him trapped at 330 feet under the water’s surface “without heat or light, and with only the small amount of breathing gas in his backup tank.” Lemon relied on this snapped tether for heliox (a gas mixture of helium and oxygen), as well as hot water to heat his suit, power for his light, and providing a communications link to the surface.

Not good.

Somewhat miraculously, Lemons survived for around 30 minutes until he was located by a remote underwater vehicle and pulled onboard a diving bell.

The documentary uses camcorder footage and audio recorded at the time of the accident, along with interviews with the participants, plus some reconstructed footage, to recount the incident.

These are “saturation divers,” divers who live for up to 28 days in a small topside chamber that is pressurized to the same level as the underwater construction environment so they don’t have to decompress after each shift. A SAT chamber typically houses two-three divers who seamlessly rotate between shifts every six hours. The undersea workers are lowered to depth using a diving bell, then lay pipelines, inspect structures, and do maintenance.

“For an outsider it’s extremely exciting and also quite fear-inducing,” says director Alex Parkinson. “I admire the people who do it, but I wouldn’t want to be locked into a pod that size for a month, going down to the seabed for eight hours at a time in the pitch-black.”

This 2019 British film was directed by Richard da Costa and Alex Parkinson. “Richard told me the story on which ‘Last Breath’ is based,” recounts Parkinson. “He’d been working on oil-industry safety films and had heard it in a bar from this sat diver. Such an incredible story, amazing characters, and the archive video was jaw-dropping. From there on we got together to work it up.”

Now, Parkinson returns to the same story for its retelling as a narrative feature film.

This new survival thriller stars Finn Cole (“Peaky Blinders,” “Animal Kingdom”) as stranded diver Chris Lemons. His colleagues are played by Simu Liu (Marvel’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”) and Woody Harrelson (“Zombieland,” “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” “The Hunger Games,” et al.).

Alex Parkinson is an Emmy-nominated director whose work includes the documentaries “Lucy, the Human Chimp” and “Living with Leopards.” “Last Breath” is his first narrative feature film.

“You don’t need to be a diver or know much about diving at all to engage with the story and the utter horror of being trapped all alone on the seabed,” says Parkinson. “So that was what drove us eventually to get it made into a feature film for a worldwide audience.”

IMDb calls the film “heart-pounding.” 

One moviegoer described it as “harrowing, yet ultimately inspiring.”

Another called it “claustrophobic.”

Still another called it “exhilarating.”

I predict you will like it too, a good edge-of-the-seat thrill ride (even if you already know that Chris Lemon survived). Matter of fact, Lemon continues to work as a diver, now an IMCA Diving Supervisor specializing in deep sea saturation diving for the oil and gas industry. The man has undeniable courage.

Truth is, I preferred the original documentary. There is a certain real-time excitement in knowing that what you’re watching actually happened.

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com