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martinklisurski
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The Last Descent (2016)
A lot of details missed and others are far-fetched
What REALLY happened to John Jones was SO much more horrific. John was basically in a tube, he couldn't see anyone. It took rescuers an hour from the surface to reach John. He was stuck for almost 28 hours before he died. In reality, he didn't just go only with his brother (Josh), he was accompanied by a large group of family and friends. It was intended to be a brief adventure that they can share before the holiday (Thanksgiving). John and Josh had a great deal of caving experience in the past, in their childhood they had gone on numerous underground adventures across the state of Utah. The film should have focused more on those childhood caving/spelunking adventures instead of those boring fillers about his normal until this point of time life. They missed very important details like that the family entered the cave at around 8:00 pm on November 24th, 2009 and everything was going alright for the first like one hour or so. At around 9:00 pm John found what he thought was the entrance to the "Birth Canal", a well-known stretch of the caves so named because of how narrow and tight it was. The passageway which confronted John certainly fitted that description. He squeezed inside and wriggled forward. When the narrow crevice took a downward turn he hesitated only for a moment. The narrow space looked as though it might open out a little bit further down, and besides he was SURE that he was in the Birth Canal - a passage that he KNEW could be safely navigated if he just kept his nerve. Unfortunately, John wasn't in the Birth Canal after all. Instead, he was wriggling headfirst down an uncharted tunnel in "Ed's Push" part of the caves, a tunnel that had never been charted specifically because it was far too small. Unaware of the danger John crawled onwards until he couldn't. John eventually saw a fissure that dropped down in front of him which may have appeared to widen out at the bottom, giving him a spot to turn around. John exhaled all of his breath and sucked in his chest to investigate the fissure and go down even deeper (head first), sliding his torso over a lip of rock and down into the 10 inches (25.4cm) wide side of the crevice but when his chest and ribcage expanded again he was stuck. Instead of widening so, John can get out the crack grew smaller and all but closed. Struggling to free himself only made John slide deeper into an even tighter 8.5-inch section of the fissure, one arm pinned underneath him and the other forced backward by an outcropping of rock. His headlamp was also knocked off. He was stuck head down in an almost vertical passage, the diameter of which was smaller than a front-loading washing machine.
Rescue workers attempted to drill out the rock around John, but were able to widen only one small part of the passage by a few inches, even after hours of labor. The small space they had to work with and the depth that John was stuck also made big equipment impossible and the small tools were not working fast enough and John didn't have a lot of time. The abandoned that idea and THEN they began constructing the pulley system which was actually shown in the movie. At first, it seemed like this tactic might succeed. They were able to raise him a significant distance out of the vertical crevice in which he was stuck, although doing so caused John a great deal of pain. After several more pulls he was high enough that he could actually make eye contact with one of the rescuers (before that he wasn't able to do so unlike what was presented in the movie). When asked how he was faring he said only, "It sucks. I can't believe I'm upside down" and "My legs are killing me". His feet hit the tunnel's low ceiling and with his heart struggling to pump blood in his legs, the contact made him scream in pain. That's when the rescue team came to the horrible realization that the angle of the tunnel meant they couldn't bend John's body backward without likely breaking his legs (which was mentioned in the movie). In his weakened state, the shock could have killed him.
At this stage, exhausted and in agony, as John was, the possibility of escape must have seemed like a very real one. An escape from his confinement, medical attention, praying and singing religious songs, contact with his friends and family... all of these things were so close that they must have been tangible to him. It was at that point that everything went wrong.
As the rescuers hauled once more on the rope something gave way explosively. The rescuer closest to John was hit in the face and briefly knocked unconscious. When he recovered all he could see was dust and darkness. It took several minutes for him to orient himself and work out the terrible realization that John had slipped right back down into the crevice from which they'd been hauling him. A stone arch around which the rope had been looped had shattered, and the next nearest bolt had pulled out of the rock, creating slack in the rope and allowing John to fall. The bolt was what had hit the rescuer in the face and knocked him out unconscious. Only one bolt came off unlike in the movie where every single one did come off.
After the injured rescuer was evacuated from the cave for treatment, a replacement was wriggled into the narrow defile. They spoke to John but could get no response, and could hear that his breathing was labored and shallow. Desperate, they wriggled down into the narrow cave to try and loop another rope around his waist but became stuck themselves and had to be helped back out. A doctor was escorted down into the caves to assess John as best he could. The news was the worst that there could possibly be: John had passed away. Despite a day-long rescue effort involving dozens of workers, the confinement and the inversion had taken its toll. He was declared dead just before midnight on November 25th.
His friends and family were devastated by the news. John was just 26 at the time, fit and healthy and his loss in a cave system considered relatively safe for beginners was a shock to everyone. It was quickly determined that any operation to retrieve his body would be impossibly difficult and dangerous. The landowner, appalled by the incident, initially wished to dynamite the caves, destroying them completely... but was dissuaded from doing so. Instead, the caves were sealed shut with concrete plug, turning them into a tomb for John Edward Jones. A plaque was installed at the entrance to memorialize the final resting place of an exceptional young man, lost way before his time.
In my opinion, the movie failed to deliver on those aspects and should have been more focused on the actual work of the rescue team and their efforts to save John's life instead of putting so many fillers and making the rescue team look incompetent directly so making the movie boring to watch.