'Last Breath': Refreshing Competence in an Age of Incompetents

Look! Skilled people working together!

At the highest levels of government, we’re currently inundated by walking examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Elon Musk, the de-facto co-president, told reporters his wrecking crew at DOGE accidentally switched off aid for Ebola prevention, but they turned it back on. Setting aside that people who know what they’re doing don’t accidentally turn off entire aid programs, this was also a lie. But because Musk and his co-president Donald Trump think they’re smart (they’re both prime examples of guys born on third base who thought they hit a triple), they’re content to tear up the Federal government not because they’ve seriously considered every policy, but because they’re arrogant and incompetent. Even if Musk wasn’t posing as an intellectual (this example of a real software engineer simply asking Musk what he means by a “crazy stack” for Twitter’s code is illustrative), the idea that because someone is the CEO of an electric car company means they understand how the Federal government operates is asinine.

The raging incompetence we see daily in the news made Last Breath feel like a balm. Some may find that competence is anathema to conflict, but I find a lovely tension between obstacles and people working to solve them because they have the expertise to do so. In Last Breath, which is based on a true story, diver Chris Lemons (Finn Cole) is fixing a deep-sea pipeline and becomes trapped hundreds of feet below the surface during a storm. Those on the ship above and his fellow divers below must work to rescue him as his oxygen runs out.

Apollo 13 is one of my all-time favorite movies, and I love that what counts as success is not completing the original mission, but how people will come together to help each other. “Failure is not an option,” is one of the film’s most famous lines, and while Gene Kranz never said it in real life, it acknowledges that success is what we owe to each other. The Apollo 13 mission had already failed. It was never going to land on the moon. And that was okay as long as mission control brought home the three astronauts safely.

Simu Liu as Dave Yuasa in Last Breath | Image via Focus Features