To paraphrase and/or completely misquote Karl Marx: History repeats itself first as documentary, then as a mid-budget survival thriller. “Little Dieter Needs to Fly” was adapted into “Rescue Dawn.” “The Rescue” was adapted into “Thirteen Lives.” And now, in that strange tradition, an incident that was first expressed through interview testimony and harrowing surveillance footage has been smoothed into a simple but suspenseful genre exercise, as Alex Parkinson adapts his 2019 documentary “Last Breath” into a mid-budget survival thriller of the same name. Creatively redundant? Perhaps. But some things are so unbelievable that they only seem to make sense as a Hollywood (or Hollywood-adjacent) movie, and the gap between fact and fiction can occasionally be too wide to cross without a middle-man to help launder the truth. The story of
