But there are worse composers to emulate, and it's still an extremely effective score, a little overwrought in places, but it does its job admirably, especially in a scene which sees Yuasa set out to try to find Lemons, with Parkinson and Da Costa using Yuasa's narration over shots of each interviewee silently reflecting on the incident, and Morgan's evocative score swelling in the background. Once the repair begins, the film adopts an almost pseudo-science-fiction tone, with the foregrounding of unfamiliar equipment and complex ship computer systems, reminding me of something like The Abyss (1989) or Leviathan (1989).Īlso aesthetically important is the score by Paul Leonard-Morgan. This inculcates the audience immediately into the milieu, insofar as Lemons is literally explaining the workings of the job, especially important in introducing the concept of saturation diving. The film opens with "first-person" camcorder footage of Lemons giving a tour of the Topaz, explained naturally insofar as he and his fiancée, Morag Martin, tended to send one-another videos rather than writing emails or letters.
That's if they can even regain control of the Topaz's DP at all.Īlthough the talking head interviews are a little flat, the rest of Last Breath looks great, with the reconstructions so well done (it helps that the actual participants play themselves) that they blend seamlessly with the footage shot from the divers' helmet-cams and the Topaz's cameras. With only five minutes of emergency oxygen in his reserve tanks, and cut off from all contact with the bell and the surface, his crewmates are horrified to realise it will take them at least 30 minutes to return to their position and try to find him.
Frederick immediately orders Lemons and Yuasa back to the bell, but Lemons's umbilical snags on the manifold, and after being pulled taut, eventually snaps. With winds now reaching 35 knots, causing 18-foot swells, the Topaz quickly begins to drift out of position, dragging the bell with it, which in turn drags the men via their umbilicals. With the Topaz locked into position by its Dynamic Positioning (DP) system, everything is going well until the system inexplicably fails, something no one on the boat had ever seen happen. At a depth of 300 feet, in pitch blackness, with ten times atmospheric pressure and temperatures just above freezing, without an umbilical, a diver can't last long. As Lemons and Yuasa begin working, Allcock remains in the bell to feed out the divers' "umbilicals" a mass of cables that brings them warm water, light, and oxygen, and keeps them connected to the Topaz's computer and AV systems. As the men descend, the Topaz is hit with bad weather, although not bad enough to cancel the dive (with dive supervisor Craig Frederick explaining, "we were at the limits of diving, but it wasn't undivable"). Descending in the diving bell are the relatively inexperienced Chris Lemons, the stoic David Yuasa (so much so, his nickname is "Vulcan"), and Lemons's mentor and father-figure Duncan Allcock. Septemthe commercial engineering ship Bibby Topaz is 115 miles off the coast of Scotland in the North Sea, assigned with testing the safety of a drilling manifold in the Huntington Oil Field.
And although the directors' insistence on building to a predictable and overly manipulated pseudo-twist undermines the seriousness of the material somewhat, with the story needing no such embellishment, this is still a superbly realised film tense and fascinating, informatively dealing with a subject about which the vast majority of people will know next-to-nothing. Using a mixture of talking head interviews, black box footage, camcorder material, and excellently mounted reconstructions, the film plays like an underwater survival thriller. nature subgenre of documentary filmmaking. Written by Alex Parkinson and directed by Parkinson and Richard da Costa, Last Breath is the latest in the man vs. Living in either an onboard pressurised capsule or a self-sustaining pressurised underwater habitat, divers breathe a helium-oxygen mix that prevents nitrogen narcosis, transferring to and from the work site via a pressurised diving bell. Colloquially known as "doing sat", saturation diving is a technique to reduce decompression sickness amongst divers who work at great depths for long periods. Reviewed by Bertaut 8 / 10 A great story powerfully toldĪside from space, there can be no working environment as potentially dangerous, perilously exacting, and psychologically isolating as the ocean floor.