Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera star in the true story of a heroic rescue which took place in California in 2018. The film is even more “visceral” than genuine news footage.
News videos of California wildfires have shown jaw-dropping devastation in recent years. But horrifying though they are, those reports are not as visceral as the experience of watching The Lost Bus. Paul Greengrass’ enthralling film – with Matthew McConaughey as a school bus driver trying to get children to safety as a fire blazes around them, and America Ferrera as a teacher on board – is based on the true story of that rescue during the 2018 Camp Fire, not to be confused with the fires earlier this year that destroyed so much of the Pacific Palisades and Altadena neighbourhoods of California. Greengrass immerses us in the fires in all their noise, heat and apparently inescapable danger.
Because the real story is known, we can approach the film assured that everyone gets out alive. The film is ultimately about heroic actions. That doesn’t lessen the tension, as burning tree limbs fall in the bus’s path and the sky darkens with smoke so that day looks like night. The Lost Bus demonstrates how powerfully drama can illuminate a story we might have thought we knew.
The film stays so close to reality that the main characters’ names have not been changed. McConaughey plays Kevin McKay, who responds to a dispatcher’s urgent call for any bus near the school, in the fire’s evacuation zone. Ferrera is Mary Ludwig, a teacher who shepherds 22 small children onto the bus that is meant to take them to where their parents are waiting in a designated area. But the fire is already so far out of control that the journey is more harrowing than anyone expects. As the film depicts in some alarming early scenes, a faulty power line sparked the fire, and a fierce wind sent it spreading so fast that the firefighters couldn’t contain it. (Throughout, to create the dramatic fire scenes, the production safely set gas fires, sometimes enhanced by CGI and footage of real fires.)
Greengrass, known for his three Jason Bourne films and the fact-based stories Captain Phillips and United 93, brings all of his expertise to bear here, generating suspense from volatile action and the characters’ emotional responses to danger. The noise of the fire is a loud relentless roar, an especially effective way to let us share their experience. Kevin has to drive along winding back roads, where at times the smoke is so thick he can barely see. Phone service and the bus’s radio go down, cutting off communication with the outside world. Kevin and Mary are on their own.