The job description “professional diver” doesn’t do justice to what Chris Lemons did for a living. The 32-year-old native of Edinburgh was part of an elite group of aquanauts known as saturation divers, who were responsible for fixing and maintaining the 20,000 miles of pipeline that rest on the ocean floor. He often descended to depths up to 10,000 feet below the surface, in freezing temperatures and highly pressurized environments. It is rightfully considered one of the single most dangerous gigs on the planet (next to firefighters, cobra tamers, and being a taste-tester at an Arby’s).
Lemons worked in the North Sea off the coast of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, as part of a rotating three-man crew. On September 18th, 2012, he and two other saturation divers prepared to go down to perform minor repairs on a pipeline several miles offshore. One of them was Duncan Allock, a veteran with 20 years of experience under his belt; he was a mentor figure to Duncan, who he’d dove with regularly, and referred to himself the young man’s “Sat Daddy.” The other was Dave Yuasa, a bit of a legend within the insular world of divers thanks to his laser-like focus, his no-nonsense attitude and an intensity that could be down right frightening. Lemons and Yuasa would be the ones in the water. Allock would be monitoring them from the deck.
In the middle of the expedition, however, a vicious storm began to buffet the ship that had brought them out to sea. Even worse: the computer system that kept it locked above the targeted location went on the fritz. As Lemons and Yuasa quickly tried to return to base, the former’s “umbilical” — the cord that fed him oxygen and kept him tethered to home base — got snagged. The more the extreme weather caused the now-powerless vessel to drift, the tighter and more constricting this literal lifeline became. Then Lemons’ umbilical cord snapped altogether, causing him to plummet back down into the darkness.
If you read about this incident back in the day or were lucky enough to catch the exceptional 2019 documentary Last Breath, then you know what happened next; the passage of time has not made the story any less tense or its ending seem any less miraculous. But maybe you prefer to get your true-life survivalist tales via celebrity dramatizations, in which case we’ll point you to the 2025 thriller Last Breath, featuring Finn Cole, Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu as the trio racing against time, the elements and what feels like 20,000 leagues worth of sea. This new take shares both the doc’s name and one of its directors, Alex Parkinson. Unlike the nonfiction chronicle, it features studio backing, a Peaky Blinders actor, one half of the O.G. True Detective dream team and a Marvel-movie star, which multiplies its potential audience by roughly a hundredfold.
And like Parkinson’s original interpretation of Lemons’ fight to stay alive (codirected by Richard da Costa), Last Breath 2.0 mixes both archival footage taken from helmet-cams and crew recordings with recreations of both the everyday and the perilous. That ratio is naturally reversed here, though the director drops in a few snippets of the actual team near the beginning and the end, including a grainy, chilling shot of the real Lemons twitching near the ocean floor. It’s both harrowing and jarring, as if someone slipped a dark-web snuff clip into a news report. But don’t worry: Once the movie settles in, its storytelling mode sticks strictly to a sort of hyped-up, yet overly familiar template that bears a striking resemblance to primetime catastrophe-TV. Imagine a pilot for Chicago Divers or Deep-Sea Rescue 911, and you’re not far off the mark.
We meet Chris (Cole) and his fiancé, Morag (Bobby Rainsbury), as they’re building a house and, more importantly, establishing a home. She’s not thrilled about his job — his description of being submerged at the ocean’s floor as “like being in outer space, but underwater” oddly doesn’t soothe her — but understands he’s passionate about it. Duncan is immediately presented as a pro but also a little kooky, a tad eccentric and quick to rib his teammates; we’re not sure if he really was a Woody Harrelson type or simply became one once Harrelson was cast, but either way, he’s gifted with that same hippie-ish, heyyyy-buddy persona. Dave comes off like a human scowl, and requires little of Liu besides completely tamping down any sense of natural charisma the Shang-Chi star has. If you keep a running character-actor scorecard and/or watch a lot of television imported from the U.K., you’ll recognize Cliff Curtis, Mark Bonnar and MyAnna Buring as crew members monitoring activities aboard the support ship.
Simu Liu in ‘Last Breath.’
Focus Features
These scenes leading up to the accident prove that Last Breath works far better as a process film than it does a procedural, giving you an almost anthropological look at how saturation divers prep in a controlled environment days before their descent, gear up, and the manner in which they float down hundreds of meters off a diving bell. The recreations in the original doc now feel like a trial run for these underwater excursions, and to his credit, Parkinson knows how to frame them for maximum shock and awe — you’d be surprised at how effective a simple image of Liu steadily plunging into the murk can be when it’s rendered in a long shot with the maximum allowance of negative space around him. (The Most Valuable Player award goes to cinematographer Nick Remy Matthews, and there is no runner-up.) Ditto the severing of Lemons’ umbilical, in which the filmmaker seemingly pays homage to a similar cinematic marooning by dropping out the sound.
Once everything switches into full-time disaster-film mode, the movie becomes something like the opposite of the event itself: the accident happened due to a perfect storm of protocol breakdowns and freak occurrences, whereas this dramatization feels like it’s completely unfolding according to a well-paved master plan. Stiflingly so, in fact. Not to keep going back to the original — in a perfect world, this new Last Breath would actually complement the doc rather than be in competition with it — but Parkinson and da Costa used the vocabulary of a survivalist thriller to bring you up to the rescue, then ingeniously reset the story to tell it from another key perspective. It was both unexpected and added depth (pun intended) to a stranger-than-fiction tale, as well as setting up its unbelievable, uplifting conclusion. The dramatized version simply floats, roils and plods forward as if being tugged dutifully along, ticking off checkpoints along the way. That IRL ending still reads as miraculous. Yet the whole thing feels still feels starved for creative oxygen.
Leave a Reply