The 33

You probably remember the international story of the 33 Chilean miners trapped deep underground for 69 days, and the massive effort to rescue them. This movie attempts to show us just how hard it was to be down there, and just how resourceful the engineers aboveground had to be to drill those holes, one of them big enough to lower a man-sized cage (luckily, there were no fat men!) down to the miners. What I hadn’t realized was just how big that mine was. They had been digging for gold for over 100 years, so the tunnels went on and on and on, deeper, wider, and more dangerous. I had been picturing something like a coal mine, with narrow passages and low ceilings. No. They drove large trucks down to the working faces, and there were big pieces of heavy equipment and vast underground rooms!

I once visited the Morton salt mine in Grand Saline, Texas, the second-biggest one in the world. We went down a long, long way in an elevator, and when were got out I was stunned at how big it was. The rooms were like cathedrals, and big earthmovers were chugging along all over the place. Well, the underground scenes in this movie were shot in a salt mine in Colombia. The above-ground stuff was at the actual site of the cave-in, the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth.

I know you have to take a re-creation movie like this with … er … a grain of salt. I’m sure they ramped it up here and there, though they met with each of the actual miners to get their stories. So I don’t know for a fact that after the men gathered in the refuge room that was supposed to have an egress to the surface, they found that the mining company had only put in a few feet of ladder, just enough so if you looked up it would seem the ladder was there. I don’t know if the first aid kit was empty, or that there were only a few stale crackers and cans of tuna in the emergency food locker. But I have absolutely no problem believing any of that, and worse. Nor was I surprised to learn that all criminal charges against the mine owners were dismissed, nor that to this day the miners have received no compensation for the entirely preventable horrors they endured. I am not at all claustrophobic, but when I think about 69 days in 100-degree temperatures, with virtually no food and a few swallows of water for the first 16 days … well, I shudder.