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REVIEW: “We’re going to die today – and I just want our bodies to be found together.”
Read this story in te reo Māori and English here. / Pānuitia tēnei i te reo Māori me te reo Pākehā ki konei.
American tourist Lauren Urey’s heartrending recollections of the day she nearly lost her husband – and her life – while on her honeymoon in our backyard form the emotional heart of a new Netflix documentary on the 2019 White Island/Whakaari parekura (tragedy).
But while it’s the tear-filled testimony of Urey, her husband Matt, young Australian tourist Jesse Langford, tour guide Kelsey Waghorn and Hamiltonian Geoff Hopkins that will give viewers of The Volcano: Rescue From Whakaari “the feels” once it debuts on the global streaming service on December 16, it’s the sensitive and sobering nature of experienced documentarian Rory Kennedy’s (Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, Last Days in Vietnam) storytelling that stays with you.
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A soup-to-nuts account of the unfolding nightmare of December 9, 2019, this showcases how a Kiwi community came together to mount a rescue operation.
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For although the Ureys now admit they would never have stepped foot on the island had they known of the real potential dangers and there’s a feeling amongst some local “rescuers” that those in authority “let them down”, this doesn’t focus on apportioning blame.
Instead, it’s a cautionary tale, a warning that nature is unpredictable, a soup-to-nuts account of the unfolding nightmare that was the afternoon of December 9, 2019 (that would eventually claim 22 lives and scar many others) and how a community came together to try and rescue and comfort as many people as they could.
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Australian tourist Jesse Langford lost three members of his family and spent eight days in a coma and two months in hospital after visiting White Island/Whakaari on that fateful day.
With details like how it was guide Hayden Marshall-Inman’s 1111th visit to the island, his protégé Tipene Maangi wasn’t supposed to be there and helicopter pilot Brian Depauw was having his first day flying solo, you can almost hear Hollywood executives eyeing up the blockbuster disaster movie potential, so thank goodness we have this Leonardo DiCaprio and Ron Howard-produced doco instead.
If there’s a sole jarring note, it’s Steve Mazzaro (Army of Thieves) and Hans Zimmer’s (Interstellar, Inception) intrusive score that sometimes feels a little too foreboding and manipulative (although the use of Teeks and Hollie Smith’s haunting version of Whakaaria Mai [How Great Thou Art] over the end credits was a beautiful touch).
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Matt and Lauren Urey pictured on White Island/Whakaari shortly before their honeymoon took a tragic turn.
Based on Alex Perry’s April 2020 Outside Magazine article The True Story of the White Island Eruption, Kennedy also does a terrific initial job of establishing a sense of space and place, of Whakaari’s economic and spiritual importance to Whakatāne on the mainland, and of how all the major interviewees came to be on the island that fateful day.
It’s testament to Kennedy and her team’s persuasive powers that they managed to secure such an impressive cross-section of interviewees and draw out such detailed and clearly still raw responses.
Likewise, the footage both from on the island and the “Phoenix” boat, which had just left it when the eruption took place, really give you a sense of the scale of the plume – and the terror it engendered.
The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari begins streaming on Netflix on December 16.
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