Only the Brave

It's challenging to make a good movie out of a story everyone already knows. There is no surprise ending, so how to make the story engaging, interesting, and effective becomes the challenge. The story of the brave fire-fighting Granite Mountain hotshot team whose members lost their lives while fighting a ferocious wildfire in Arizona has been around since that event happened several years ago. It was shocking that 19 men died in the fire, so what would be the purpose in retelling the story?

The film version of the story, Only the Brave, is very effective in building relationships with the 19 men involved in the incident. The viewer sees their humanity, their personal issues that all of us have, but that we leave at home when we report for work. A team is only as strong as its weakest link, so much of the hotshots' time is spent building a fast-moving, effective, dedicated fire-fighting unit. By the time the team earns its hotshot status, the viewer is completely inside the story being shown on the screen.

I did not know that the firefighters died as a result of the failure of the water drop on their location, but that seems to be what happened. The two sides of the out-of-control wildfire suddenly burst into flame and came together, trapping the 19 men, who quickly deployed their individual shelters to protect them from the flames. The water tanker flew directly over their position, but didn't drop the water--and there was nothing that would protect the men from the ferocity of the flames as the fire merged mercilessly at the one exact spot the men were sheltering in place. There was nowhere else for the men to go, so their fate was sealed.

I don't know if the waterdrop would have given them a chance at survival or if that point is moot in the face of the ferocious flames, but my tears and my sorrow for the men were unabated as the film drew to an end.

There is a memorial at a hundred-year-old desert shrub outside Prescott, AZ that the hotshot team saved during another fire. There is a picture of the hotshot crew, smiles wide across their faces as they climbed on top of one another to make a pyramid of them after saving the tree. It made the silent point about the joy these men felt from doing their job to the best of their ability, all the while knowing that any fire could be their last.