Last Breath review: Apollo 13 goes under the sea

“It’s like going into space, but underwater,” saturation diver Chris Lemons (Finn Cole) says of his uncommon vocation, fixing manmade machinery at depths to which man was not meant to descend. His fiancée takes little comfort in the comparison, nor should she. Impossibly dark, severely cold, perilous to the oxygen dependent: In Last Breath, the sea floor really does seem a lot like the vacuum of space. No wonder the mind wanders to crucibles of astronauts during the suspenseful passages of this ripped-from-the-captain’s-log survival thriller.

More specifically, one might think of the cinematically immortalized plight of the Apollo 13 crew. Last Breath is built with the same nuts and bolts as Ron Howard’s Oscar-winning take on that ill-fated expedition. Similarly invested in the how of a mission gone wrong, it’s another Hollywood procedural about problem solving where one wrong calculation could leave the imperiled gasping for air. 

The subject, in this case, is a 2012 mishap in the North Sea, where the real Chris Lemons got stranded doing what some ominous opening text describes as “one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.” Sent into the drink to repair an oil pipeline, Chris was cut off from his means of communication — along with his literal lifeline of H2O and warm water — when his “umbilical” to the ship snapped. Last Breath chronicles the attempts to recover him during a storm, as his backup oxygen and related likelihood of survival dwindles by the minute.

Writer-director Alex Parkinson has told this true story before. Dramatizing the events covered in his 2019 documentary of the same name, Last Breath basically amounts to a feature-length reenactment, showing us everything the real-life subjects of the earlier film recounted via talking-head interviews. Parkinson even reproduces some of their recorded conversations, only this time it’s famous actors trading banter and jargon: Woody Harrelson lends his signature twinkle of sly humor as the crew’s veteran diver, while resident Marvel martial artist Simu Liu plays the most no-nonsense of Chris’ aquatically qualified colleagues.

The movie is pretty no-nonsense, too. It’s been made with the attention to detail — and the allergy to dramatic fabrication — you’d expect from a documentarian who feels beholden to the truth of a story he’s unpacked at length. Parkinson tracks the situation in something like real time, crosscutting from the darkness below to the scramble of the damage control above. He keeps his focus locked on locking mechanisms, among other specifics of the equipment that put Lemons in peril. Last Breath wants us to understand what went wrong that day, and the measures the crew took to respond, from manually rebooting the computer system to attempting to use a drone to carry an unconscious body to the surface.

You can see the breadth of research that went into the project, as well as Parkinson’s admirable refusal to gild the lily with action-movie exaggerations. What actually happened is exciting enough, he reasons, half-reasonably. His commitment to verisimilitude is both the film’s greatest asset and its ultimate limitation. It’s possible to admire a just-the-facts-ma’am approach to this material while still pining for a little Hollywood embellishment. At a mere 93 minutes, Last Breath could use more complications. It’s fairly gripping from moment to moment, but also hemmed in by its own sense of historical integrity — by the dogged way Parkinson sticks to the factual outline of a situation that’s a few escalations shy of a truly ripping yarn.

If there are liberties here, they’re mostly in the matter of characterization. Beyond a score that swells inspirationally at key junctures, the phoniest thing about Last Breath is the little arcs it provides the divers between scenes of oceanic danger, rescue preparation, or precariously analog workarounds. Will Harrelson’s Duncan make peace with his forced retirement from a career in the watery deep? Will a matter of life or death put any cracks in the stony facade of professionalism that Liu’s Dave wears like a second helmet? And while Chris may be married to the sea, it’s his impending marriage to Morag (Bobby Rainsbury) that we’re meant to cling to like a buoy when all seems lost and the air supply seems depleted.

In the documentary, Parkinson resorted to sleight of hand — some selective withholding of information — to disguise how this true story ends. No such trickery is required in his second shot at Last Breath, because the film unfolds entirely in the present tense; it’s one of a few ways it proves more successful than its nonfiction predecessor at putting the audience right down there in the water with Chris, knuckles whitened, eyes on the clock. At the same time, the very fact that Hollywood executives saw box office potential in his ordeal should give you some hint of how it’s resolved. Audiences will accept a disaster movie of meticulous scientific accuracy so long as it ends the way they hope and the music promises it will.

Last Breath is now playing in theaters everywhere. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.