Survival thrillers are enthralling. Set in situations where the force of nature — not man — is the enemy, these thrillers often highlight grit in the face of unpredictable danger. While these films’ endings can themselves be predictable, filmmakers manage to engage us all the same by using this natural environment as a source of suspense.
Director Alex Parkinson’s survival thriller “Last Breath” is an adaptation of his 2019 documentary of the same name, based on the real life story of saturation diver Chris Lemons (Finn Cole, “Locked In”). “Last Breath” details the rescue mission of Chris after an incident which finds him stranded underwater. Fellow divers David Yuasa (Simu Liu, “Atlas”) and Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson, “Fly Me to the Moon”) — who are in the same diving bell as Chris — work tirelessly to retrieve him, all while Captain Andre Jenson (Cliff Curtis, “Ka Whawhai Tonu”) directs the on-deck crew amid technical malfunctions with the ship. In the meantime, Chris follows David’s advice to climb to the top of the manifold, where it will be easiest to rescue him, despite his rapidly depleting oxygen tank.
Unfortunately, Chris’s spectacular journey falls flat as a feature film. In the original documentary, it is befitting to marvel only at the rescue mission, but in a feature, this approach doesn’t allow for enough character development. In “Last Breath,” the only scene that develops Chris before his accident involves him reassuring his fiancée, Morag (Bobby Rainsbury, “Only You”), that he will come back unscathed. Parkinson highlights Chris’s connection to Morag, filming Chris putting a photo of Morag next to his bed and emphasizing that she’s the only thing on his mind before he dives. However, merely showing glimpses of Chris’s backstory isn’t enough for the viewer to truly build a connection with him as a person. “Last Breath” only shows Chris’s emotions in the fleeting minutes before the accident, but those emotions mean very little to the viewer without having experienced Chris’s journey of becoming a diver or his relationship with Morag.
In contrast, an example of a film doing this well is Ridley Scott’s survival thriller “The Martian,” which builds empathy for the main character Mark Whatney (Matt Damon, “The Instigators”) before his courageous escape from disaster after being stranded on Mars. His eventual rescue is preceded by scenes where he learns to plant potatoes, finds a way to make contact with the team on Earth and builds a spacecraft that will allow him to reunite with the rest of his crew. “The Martian” allows viewers to be part of Mark’s journey over the span of multiple weeks, feeling all of his anger, sadness and fear at the challenges he faces. In “Last Breath,” on the other hand, we only root for Chris because he’s the main character — we want him to survive in the face of grave danger, but we aren’t rooting for him on a personal level, given we have relatively little knowledge of his personality or deeper motivations.
The side characters in “Last Breath” often feel like archetypes meant to advance Chris’s story rather than fully realized people themselves. Expanding on the buildup and aftermath of Chris’s accident would make for a far more compelling focus in this feature, as well as help flesh out the side characters while still staying true to the real life story the film is based on. We aren’t given any information about Morag other than the fact that she seems very concerned about Chris’s career. In addition to fleshing out her character, “Last Breath” could have also discussed why Chris wanted to become a saturation diver despite Morag’s objections and the challenges he faced in the five dives preceding this one. The hardened realist David and the confident, laid-back Duncan also seem like interesting characters, yet a large part of the screen time shared between David, Duncan and Chris focuses solely on the buildup to Chris’s disaster.
Parkinson could have easily built up the character dynamics to give more reason for viewers to feel invested in Duncan and David. In the film, we learn that Duncan was an important figure in Chris’s career — having been present for Chris’s first five dives — but Parkinson fails to emphasize what it means to Chris that this dive might be Duncan’s last before retirement. David, too, is underdeveloped. In a scene before the disaster, David tells Chris, after noticing Chris’s picture of Morag by his bed, that he shouldn’t think about what happens on the outside when he’s in the diving bell. A little later, David then pulls a picture of his two daughters from his bag. Here, Parkinson could have had David open up to Chris about his past adventures, prompting more information about what hardened David into becoming so practical. The lack of character development and motivations make Duncan and David really one-dimensional additions to what is ultimately just a story about Chris’s survival, rather than emphasizing the importance of any of these characters who helped rescue Chris.
Sticking closely to Chris’s courageous, true story avoids dramatizing his life. However, whether it be by exploring Chris more before the accident, focusing on Morag and her objections to Chris’s career or just exploring the dynamic between Chris, David and Duncan, Parkinson had a lot of missed opportunities to highlight the existing character dynamics of Chris’s true story to make it a more impactful film. The resulting product feels hollow; Parkinson takes the audience on a rollercoaster of emotions, but this feeling doesn’t stay with us long after we’ve watched the film, as there isn’t enough plot development to tie these emotions back to the characters.
“Last Breath” left me with more of an appreciation for what saturation divers do. Diving 300 feet underwater to fix pipelines is an honorable feat of courage. It’s an evocative display of fearlessness in the face of peril that works well as a documentary film. As a feature film, however, “Last Breath” fails to live up to its extraordinary premise.
Daily Arts Writer Kristen Su can be reached at krsu@umich.edu.
The post ‘Last Breath’ didn’t leave me breathless appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
Leave a Reply