AVClub: Five years ago, 33 men were pulled, one by one, out of a gold and copper mine in Chile after a mountain literally fell on them, stranding them several hundred meters underground for more than two months. The 33, the major motion picture that’s been made out of this extraordinary ordeal, arrives as a sort of buried-alive companion piece to The Martian—a nuts-and-bolts rescue mission during which the majority of the ensemble struggles to keep the faith against long-shot odds. Set in an Atacama Desert where everyone talks in English (a newscaster is the sole Spanish speaker), the movie certainly hasn’t been streamlined into The 7 or The 8. In addition to the few-dozen miners, led by “Super” Mario Sepúlveda (Antonio Banderas), The 33 spends significant time with the folks aboveground at Camp Hope, where the country’s telegenic minister of mining (Rodrigo Santoro) coordinates efforts to save those trapped by the cave-in, and a hotheaded maker of empanadas (Juliette Binoche), her partially estranged brother buried below, serves as a mouthpiece for the affected citizens of Copiapó.
We Got This Covered
Buried in The 33 is a very good film – possibly even a great one. That it’s undermined by its lack of focus perhaps points to what it was trying to achieve: to show a real-life disaster that occurred in recent memory, to do right by the miners and their families without appearing maudlin or predatory, and to tell an entertaining, cinematic story. Director Riggen might have been better off opting for something far less grandiose and more personal, focusing on the miners rather than attempting to tell a back and forth rescue narrative. The real story is there beneath the ground, and The 33 only tells a part of it.
Screenrant
On August 5th, 2010, 33 miners entered the San Jose copper-gold mine in Chile’s Atacama Desert – only to become trapped that afternoon when the 121-year old mine collapsed. Buried 2,300 feet under the earth, the miners managed to take shelter in a “refuge” room – which housed an emergency cache (rations and medical supplies). Unfortunately, the refuge room was meagerly stocked, and only intended to accommodate 30 workers, forcing the trapped miners, led by shift foreman Luis Urzúa (Lou Diamond Phillips) and Mario Sepúlveda (Antonio Banderas), to carefully allocate food and water, extending their survival for as long as possible – in the fading hope of rescue.
We Got This Covered
As an international incident is working its way through the news cycle, you can bet cracks are being made on social media about who will option the movie rights. In the particularly protracted case of the 2010 Chilean mining accident, such an adaptation could have been made and released before any of the miners were. It took 69 days and tens of millions of dollars to rescue the 33 men trapped deep within the San José mine, and the world took notice. Now, The 33 lets you revisit those long weeks of waiting in a comparatively comfortable two hours. No diamond cutter of insight, The 33 compresses details, events, and people into bite-sized doses of Based on a True Story uplift. Yet, there are flecks of gold to be found within this rich load of hooey.
