Hollywood glamorizes saga of Chilean miners in sanitized version which doesn’t ring true
On August 5, 2010, the San José copper-gold mine partly collapsed in Chile’s northern Atacama Desert and left 33 miners trapped 700 metres underground for 69 days. For a story that captivated the whole world, the Hollywood film didn’t bother with real flesh-and-blood characters here. What you have, instead, are heroic figures who only occasionally weaken; families and relatives who are nothing but sketchy figures with no personal traits of any kind; and one-dimensional public officials who have incredible willpower and strength.
Several unsuccessful rescue efforts followed until on the 17th day rescuers found a note attached on a drill head that had reached the depths of the mine, which read: “The 33 of us in the shelter are well”.
So the Chilean administration implemented a US$20-million large scale plan which included international drilling rig teams and the know-how of NASA to rescue the miners. After 69 days, the 33 men were brought to the surface safely on 13 October 2010 with a TV and internet audience of over one billion viewers worldwide. Those were the facts the world learned about then.
But then other facts stained such a triumph. For starters, a further investigation into the Copiapó mining accident said that the owners of the obsolete mine shouldn’t be criminally charged, and so Alejandro Bohn and Marcelo Kemeny were never put on trial. Needless to say, that ruling met public criticism.
“Most mine owners are afraid to hire us because they think that if there’s ever a problem everyone will immediately find out about it since we get a lot press. We’re well known,” Omar Reygadas, one one of the 33 miners, told reporters.
Of course they are well known. They were the stuff media operations are made of back then and now they are the protagonists of Los 33 (The 33), a movie version of their story, or better said a romanticized Hollywood tale directed by Mexican Patricia Riggen and starring Antonio Banderas, Juliette Binoche, Gabriel Byrne, Rodrigo Santoro and James Brolin.
And Los 33 also comes with its own share of controversy. Because while still trapped in the mine, the 33 miners had collectively signed a contract with Héctor Tobar, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer at the Los Angeles Times, to write an authorized version of their story. That, and the movie. But according to miner Víctor Zamora, they were cheated because the lawyers pressed them to sign the contracts to waive the rights to their story to make a movie right after they left the mine while being heavily medicated and not fully aware of what they were agreeing to. Six other miners also said they didn’t understand what the contracts meant.
Another case of censorship took place with film critic Leopoldo Muñoz, who on August 6 quit his position as leading film critic of the daily Las Últimas Noticias because his editors published his film review of Los 33 with his by line, but also with changes he was unaware of. According to Muñoz, Los 33 is a propaganda vehicle connected with former president Sebastián Piñera, and he also stressed the role of the main local producer of the film, businessman Carlos Eugenio Lavín, who’s currently accused of having illegally financed the candidacies of several politicians during the last presidential elections in Chile.
So there you have a nice social and political backdrop. Of course, the movie only comprises the story of the mining accident and nothing but. As such, it basically tells three stories at once: that of the miners trapped in the mine, that of their loved ones in the makeshift camp by the mine, and that of the public officials in charge of the rescue. Most of the screen time goes to the miners, then to the rescuers, and last to the families. And all three stories run into the same huge, unsolvable problems.
Not a single character is developed in a realistic vein, not a single line of dialogue comes across as something you’d hear out of any of these individual’s lips in this angst-ridden context, and not a single performance feels real. So you have an obstacle twice the size of the megatonne boulder beneath which the miners are buried alive — which, in turn, is twice the size of the Empire State Building.
Los 33 was shot in real working mines in Colombia and Chile, and you’d think that being trapped in a mine would make you feel claustrophobic, but that doesn’t happen here either. It’s as if you were inside any somewhat small space, but not particularly trapped, not particularly fearful, and definitely not particularly dangerous. Come to think of it, maybe the idea was not to make viewers feel fear, which would explain the meaning of the moronic scene of the last supper where the miners imagine their loved ones coming with fresh meals to comfort them. Maybe viewers are not meant to be anguished.
It’s very clear that, in stark contrast with reality, Los 33 is a naïve, romanticized Hollywood version of a traumatic event that on the big screen is simplified and sanitized. It’s very clear too that there’s a notion of a country to be hammered into viewers’ heads: Chile as a brave warrior that won’t succumb to any tragedy, an administration that will do the right thing, and miners who will be free and happy at last — as the images of the smiling real life miners in the ending intend to prove.
That would explain the abuse of the incidental music, the vignettes of the campers who never give up hope — a relative at the camp Esperanza (Hope) singing Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto (I give thanks to life, which has given me so much), seems a bit of an excess, the miners who may at times confront one another but soon enough are the best of friends again, the lack of genuine dramatic situations, of pain, of a feeling of impending doom. And, of course, there are also the clichés of what Latin Americans are like, but don’t get me started on that.
You’d expect all of this coming from Hollywood. But you’d expect in the shape of a great epic, a monumental ordeal, a tale of huge proportions, if you will. With splendour, out-of-this-world visual effects, a majestic and larger than life mise-en-scene. It has none of that. Los 33 doesn’t even get close to be a great Hollywood epic. And it’s certainly not a realistic drama. It rings too false.
Production notes
Los 33 (Chile/US, 2015). Directed by Patricia Riggen. Based on the novel Deep Down Dark, by Héctor Tobar. Written by Mikko Alanne, Michael Thomas, Craig Borten, José Rivera. With Antonio Banderas, Juliette Binoche, Gabriel Byrne, Rodrigo Santoro, James Brolin, Bob Gunton. Cinematography: Checco Varese. Editing: Michael Tronick. Running time: 122 minutes.
