“Water can be very violent, and this is a very difficult [cave rescue] because of the extreme high flow, the zero visibility, the boulder pile chokes, restrictions.”
Edd Sorenson in Vox article about daring cave rescue
Now that the 12 young soccer players and their coach have been rescued from a cave in Thailand, we can address why their story captived the world.
CONFLICT
Conflict is always a good place to start. Here you had young boys and their coach who accidentally got trapped 2.5 miles inside a cave.
STAKES
It’s monsoon season in Thailand and the timeframe was closing to get the boys out alive.
MAJOR DRAMATIC QUESTION
The major questions on everyone’s mind was some version of, “How are they going to rescue those boys?” It’s a simple and primal question that is clearly understood. Often movies/screenplays fail on this basic storytelling tool.
The Major of Central Dramatic Question
EMOTION
No need to explain why this was an emotional situation.
ENDINGS
This was mostly a happy ending. It was tinged with the loss of life of one of the volunteers. That death reminded us of how dangerous a mission it was to rescue the boys. The fact that the boys had been in the cave since June 23—more than two weeks—built the tension with the world watching. That made their resue all the sweeter. Check out the VOX article by Radhika Viswanathan to see a solid example of multimedia journalism that’s only a couple hours old, but shows what it took to bring the boys and the coach out alive.
Happy, Sad, Ironic, Ambiguous Endings
P.S. You could do a nice list of the best movies written around the concept of a search and rescue. I’ll start a list here and keep adding to it until I get 20:
Saving Private Ryan
Die Hard
Captain Phillips
Black Hawk Down
The Martian
Apollo 13
Toy Story