The 33 (2015)

The 33 arrives with the solemn bearing of a film that knows it is important. Patricia Riggen directs a reconstruction of the 2010 Copiapo mine collapse, in which thirty-three Chilean workers spent sixty-nine days beneath the Atacama dirt while the world watched and a drilling rig crept toward them. Antonio Banderas plays Mario Sepulveda, the foreman who rations the tuna and holds the men together. The production is competent, the underground photography suitably close, and James Horner's score, one of the last he completed, swells at all the appointed moments. It is a Hollywood disaster picture wearing a documentary's coat, and the coat does not quite fit.

The film earns a measure of credit for its casting. A studio picture headlined by a Latino ensemble, telling a Latin American story in its own idiom, remains uncommon enough to note, and the gesture is genuine. The villain, meanwhile, is corporate: the mine owner ignored the warning signs, and the company declines to fund a rescue until the state intervenes. This is a critique of greed that stays comfortably inside the disaster genre's furniture. Riggen is a woman directing a story that includes Maria Segovia, a miner's sister who becomes the voice of the families at the gate. Her stubbornness registers, though the film treats it as local color instead of argument.

Where the picture reaches for meaning, it reaches for uplift. Speeches about safety and solidarity are placed in the mouths of the right people at the right times, and the audience is invited to feel good about the human spirit. The liberties taken with the record (an invented slap, a reordered first rescue, heroics that belong to no one in particular) fall within the ordinary license of dramatization. The result is earnest, watchable, and slightly exhausting, a film that wants our tears and settles for our shrugs.