Director Alex Parkinson remakes his own deep-sea doc as a narrative feature but gets lost in the shallows.
I haven’t seen Alex Parkinson’s documentary Last Breath, but I can only imagine it offers up richer characterizations and more genuine suspense than the filmmaker’s narrative version, which quickly sinks to the bottom of the sea and remains there for 93 listless minutes.
The true-life tale of diver Chris Lemons (played here by Finn Cole, Peaky Blinders), who survived 30 oxygen-free minutes in deep, deep waters, would seemingly lend itself to a tense rescue thriller and uplifting story of human perseverance, but Parkinson and his two fellow screenwriters miss every opportunity that the story presents.
We meet Chris and his fiancée Morag (Bobby Rainsbury) as he is setting out on a deep-sea diving expedition to repair a natural-gas pipeline; he assures her that what he does for a living is no different than going into outer space, only it’s under water. She replies with the film’s best line: “I love that you think that’s somehow reassuring.”
Morag, who is seen planning their upcoming wedding and designing their proposed dream house, is one of a series of characters who seem like vintage tropes the writers found behind a filing cabinet in the RKO archives. Other clichés (as presented here) include Woody Harrelson as Duncan, the wisecracking veteran diver going on One Last Mission, and Simu Liu’s no-nonsense Dave, who’s all about getting the job done right. These surface descriptors are the entirety when it comes to the characters; even Chris is something of an enigma, outside of his wanting to do his job well and being in love with Morag.
For viewers interested in process, there are some informative scenes involving the divers going into hyperbaric chambers to prepare their bodies for the crushing pressure of deep waters. But once the dive goes wrong — storms are tossing the ship around, which leads to the rupture of Chris’ umbilical and then makes rescue difficult — Last Breath never takes advantage of the inherent drama of the situation. There’s a distinct lack of tension where there ought to be terror, and what’s left is the protagonist running out of air and lying still. And once he recovers, the movie just keeps going, anti-climactically, until a title card announces that science remains baffled as to how Chris even survived.
Narrative remakes of documentaries are right up there with live-action remakes of animated features when it comes to cinema’s most pointless genre. Did viewers learn anything, or feel anything deeper, from The Walk or Welcome to Marwen that they didn’t already get from the superior Man on Wire or Marwencol? Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it’s also quite often inimitably more moving, unpredictable, and dramatic. If there was a case to be made that Parkinson could find some new element of this story by telling it as fiction, Last Breath fails to make it.
The cast is game for what must have been a physically challenging shoot, but they’re all stuck with very little to play. The most memorable performance comes from veteran UK character actor Mark Bonnar, who makes a meal out of staring at monitors and giving orders via headset; it’s a challenge for any actor to turn that particular role into something substantial, but Bonnar imbues the dive coordinator with genuine emotion and humor.
Director of photography Nick Remy Matthews and his underwater crew capture the crushing darkness and emptiness of the bottom of the ocean, but their efforts are undercut by Paul Leonard-Morgan’s ubiquitous score; in the rare moments when the filmmakers allow for some silence, we get a glimpse of the claustrophobic dread that could have been summoned throughout.
Last Breath was made by someone who clearly connects with this material, but somewhere between the non-fiction and fiction versions, the emotional impact has been rendered unfathomable.
