Why ‘Last Breath’ Is About More than Underwater Survival

”Last Breath,” starring Woody Harrelson, Finn Cole and Simu Liu, joins “The Abyss” in surprising audiences with treasures found under the sea.

Its stunning tale touches the soul, though, in a way all its own.

Warning: spoilers ahead.

In a true 2012 event, commercial divers Chris Lemons and Dave Yuasa were working on massive equipment deep below the surface when Lemons and the diving ship off the coast of Scotland suffered an unimaginable disaster.

As an unrelenting storm tossed and jolted the vessel, the ship’s navigation and communication systems were taken offline. The wild careening of the ship, which is attached directly to the diving bell, caused Lemons’ essential umbilical–the tube that feeds air into the divers’ helmets and warm water into their climate-control suits–to be severed.

Trying mightily to return to breathable atmosphere as waves carry away the diving bell, catastrophically Lemons also runs out of emergency oxygen.

Many meters under the Black Sea, Lemons blacks out, alone and helpless. The battered ship and Lemons’ operational support crew, thousands of meters down current, drift farther away by the second.

A 2019 documentary captured the intense situation and even more incredible resolution.

Harrelson says of the new movie, “There is a spiritual element to it in the midst of an action film.”

Divers Lemons (Cole), Yuasa (Liu) and Duncan Allock (Harrelson) find something lumenescent in their struggle for survival in the depths. What it is may take quite a different form from that which was discovered, thanks to James Cameron’s imagination, in “The Abyss.” Yet, as Harrelson hints, a diamond of the spirit is recovered in “Last Breath.”

The movie churns with a tenacious realism to recreate diving conditions, tethered to documented occurrences. The director, Alex Parkinson, also previously helmed the six-year-old documentary on Lemons.

“This is the story I’ve lived with for 10 years now, and I know it inside out. I aimed to do more than just remake the documentary. I wanted to tell this remarkable story on the grandest scale possible, and explore new dimensions of the characters’ emotional journeys.”

The undersea world sternly limits human capabilities. Divers know intimately, as do scientists, that the deep oceans are more unfamiliar and obscure, in a sense, than outer space.

Even the faraway cosmos, after all, are above and outside of the brooding sea.

What makes commercial diving such a technically specialized career is that rigorous training is required in order to develop fluency in operating down there.

An ironclad focus on the task at hand permeates “Last Breath,” start to finish. Lemons, Yuasa, and Allock in addition to the Dive Supervisor, 1st Officer, ROV pilot, and Ship Captain Andre Jensen–are about their work.

A commercial diving vessel can have up to 100 crew members supporting the two to three human beings submersed in suits below.

Because the movie is soaked in diving professionalism, it’s almost never not about the dive. Each scene turns up the cranks on you with its compression of focus. Minute after minute, in your seat wherever you may be, you feel remarkably as if you are surrounded by a high-pressure substance.

And that’s while everyone is still safe and sound.

Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu, and Finn Cole star in LAST BREATH, based on the electrifying true story. Only in theaters February 28. pic.twitter.com/mPc7mHLphL

— Focus Features (@FocusFeatures) December 18, 2024

By the time the divers below are experiencing unthinkable difficulties, and the sense of pressure intensifies, we are ironically taken to the ship’s bridge.

There, we hear the crew and commercial equipment operators (few if any of them first-responders by trade) struggling to shift the mission from an installation job, to saving desperately endangered lives.

Underwater, a dire reality of a stranded, cut off, deoxygenated diver unfolds. Yet up above on the bridge, an almost bureaucratic slog sloshes.

The agonizing hesitancy lends a mind-game-y subplot to the mid-movie turning point. Nauseating talk of environmental regulations during the height of a needed rescue tickled my political outrage. Capt. Jensen seemed one breath from adding, wokely, “Hold your horses, everybody. George Floyd couldn’t breathe, either.”

Ship management’s absurd considerations and regulatory obligations pile up, and the movie smartly allows the audience to reflect.

Finally, conflicts of interest are purged. Filters of perception are cleansed. The divers become, again, the matter at hand. Finally, love for fellow man swells to meet the gravity and concentration that dominates the picture. Humanity comes back into proper focus. Obstinate characters, at last, know what to do–fire up whatever on the ship needs to be rebooted, and go get Chris!

Pressure makes us refine our true priorities.

The reality of saving Chris Lemons’ blue, chilled body off the seafloor–and then some!–would, if it were a script of fiction, be panned by some reviewers as “over the top.” One can see a headline now–”Believe in Science, not ‘Last Breath!’”

Yet it happened! How?

What role did the drop in Lemons’ body temperature play? What kept water out of the mask after the umbilical snapped? How did Lemons’ ordeal differ from drowning without a diving helmet, in which water actually floods the lungs? What were the sensations in Lemons’ body from fingers to chest as oxygen levels depleted?

For audience members hungry for pragmatic learning, technical questions abound.

Harrelson, though, is right: the main current of this movie is spiritual cleansing and catharsis.

Truth be told, I strode into Theater 7 at the cineplex thinking it was “The Last Supper.” I’m sure glad for that “mistake.” Watching the interpersonal workings in “Last Breath” that led to a deep-sea rescue, I couldn’t help but feel I’d gained a better understanding of the Gospel accounts of rescue on the turbulent sea.

Whatever howling attack from the gales disabled and usurped control of the S.S. Bibby Topaz that day, the interdependent crew, like Sir Lancelot reviving a fellow Knight of the Round Table, ultimately got it together enough to put every last life first.

How will nations and the greater kingdom under the good Lord, co-reliant also on one another and the Earth’s ecosphere, get it together?

Harrelson, notably, is a commonsense bellwether of cultural drift. Describing himself as a “Texas hippie redneck anarchist,” he has commented upon totalitarian social manipulation, lost freedoms and mass hypoglycemia in America, seeming to be aligned with MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) values.

Through the compressed contemplation in “Last Breath” of an embattled subset of humanity on the edge of a deep abyss, it is clear that only centering the value of human life can get us back on board.

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