Bus driver Kevin and schoolteacher Mary are tasked with keeping a busload of kids calm and safe during a horrific wildfire. But this story—based on a real one—takes viewers on a difficult ride of their own, filled as it is with R-rated language and imperiled children.
Weeks without rain. Fierce wind gusts. A snapped power line.
A disaster sparking.
Kevin McKay eyes the smoke-filled skies. He barely sees the firetrucks fly by. The bus driver has his own cascading disasters to worry about that morning, Nov. 8, 2018.
You can’t make a living driving school buses in Paradise, California, and Kevin’s barely staying afloat. He begs for more shifts, but the dispatcher, Ruby, won’t do it. Seniority, she says. Right.
On top of that, Kevin’s surly son, Shaun, skipped school the day before. He said he was sick, but Kevin knows better. He accused his 15-year-old of faking it, and they fought. Just like they always did.
Now he’s hearing that Shaun’s throwing up, and Kevin feels almost as bad. He knows what he’ll do: He’ll swing by the pharmacy, pick up some Tylenol, take it right home and apologize to Shaun in person.
Who cares that Ruby expected Kevin to take the bus in for maintenance? Who cares she just might fire him? Shaun’s his son. About time Kevin started acting like it. Hey, Kevin’s lost jobs for worse reasons.
But the smoke is getting closer. The firetrucks keep zooming past. And Ruby’s voice comes across the radio, asking for a favor.
A wildfire is growing, spreading, racing toward Paradise. City officials just issued a mandatory evacuation order for the east part of town. Ponderosa Elementary School is right in the middle. And while most of the children are with their parents now, 23 kids need a ride to the nearest evacuation center.
“Is there anybody empty in the area of Ponderosa?” Ruby asks.
Driver after driver begs off, their buses filled with kids. Kevin listens in, hoping someone’ll take the job. After all, Kevin’s got his own kid to think about. His own disasters to fix.
But finally, he picks up. “963 to base,” he says. “I can get ‘em.”
It’ll be a quick trip, Kevin tells himself. The evacuation center is just 10 minutes from Ponderosa. He’ll drop the kids off, do his good deed, keep his job. Shaun’ll get his medicine just a few minutes late, that’s all.
Kevin couldn’t know that he, a teacher named Mary and 23 children would soon be engulfed in the deadliest fire in California history. Over the next few hours, they’ll all learn a new definition for disaster.
Natural disasters destroy. And the Camp Fire (the real-world fire at the core of The Lost Bus) doled out almost unimaginable destruction.
But disasters also create, too: They create heroes.
We meet two of them here. Kevin (based on a real bus driver) displays a great deal of courage and creativity to safeguard the kids in his care. Schoolteacher Mary proves to be a rock of stability in an incredibly chaotic situation, doing her utmost to keep the children calm.
Sometimes they switch those roles, too: Mary takes her turn behind the wheel once or twice, joins Kevin outside to put out some all-too-near fires and risks her life to grab some water for the kids. And when Mary’s tapped out, it’s Kevin’s turn to encourage the children. He forms a particularly close attachment to Toby, a young boy growing up without a father. As Kevin feels like he’s failing his own son, he takes Toby under his wing and tells him that his father is “doing everything he can to get to you. And he’s trying his best.” Sure, it’s what Kevin longs to tell his own son, but it encourages Toby.
We meet heroes outside that bus, too. Early on, an off-duty firefighter swings into action to save people in the nearby community of Concow—organizing a convoy to get citizens to safety. Fire Chief Ray Martinez coordinates the blaze-fighting efforts with insight and composure. Jen Kissoon, one of Ray’s lieutenants, works hand-in-hand with her supervisor. And at a critical juncture, she advises Ray to make a difficult decision. “We can fight the fire, or we can save lives,” she says. “We are out of time.”
To no one in particular, Mary says, “Please, please, please.” It could be interpreted as a half-formed prayer—or simply Mary talking to herself. We hear about a Christmas dinner. We hear a portion of Chris Stapleton’s song “Broken Halos” on the radio.
We hear that Shaun was the product of an unplanned pregnancy.
The Lost Bus takes you into the inferno that ultimately destroyed the town of Paradise and torched more than 150,000 acres. Scenes feel realistic and, at times, terrifying.
A couple of people catch on fire during the film, their clothes serving as a horrific torch. (One victim is quickly saved by another bystander. The other is seen just in passing, and we don’t know that person’s ultimate fate.) Jen talks about the human toll the fire is taking. “We’re getting reports of people burning to death in their cars,” she tells the chief. “And we’ve got hundreds of people running for their lives on foot.”
Kevin sees some of those people. He drives by a group of pedestrians walking in the other direction. The pedestrians talk about the carnage that lies ahead of the bus. “You don’t want these kids to see what we just saw,” one tells Kevin. “Trust me.” Elsewhere, panicked residents try to break into the bus: One has a gun and threatens Kevin with it, firing the weapon at least once. (Kevin ultimately kicks the man free of the bus doors.)
The kids on the bus are imperiled pretty much throughout the movie. Smoke pours in through the air conditioning unit until Kevin turns it off. Mary and Kevin caution the children to stay away from the windows and floors, as those are getting overheated. At one point, Mary wonders aloud whether she and Kevin should “Just let them go to sleep. It’s better. And then if the fire comes …” She lets the thought trail off before Kevin tells her to stop thinking that way.
Kevin recalls the last time he talked with his own father: His dad attacked him—not an unusual occurrence—and “on this night I snapped.” He talks about how he was “screaming and swinging” before he stormed out of the house, with his dad telling him, “I wish you were dead.” Earlier in the movie, Shaun said the same thing to Kevin.
Kevin burns his hands and arms as he tries to put out a few fires. He takes his cancer-ridden dog into the vet’s office to have him euthanized.
Ten f-words and about 15 s-words. We also hear “a–,” “d–n” and “h—.” God’s name is misused about 20 times, three of them with the word “d–n.”
Kevin drives the bus to a pharmacy to pick up some medicine for his son, which he hopes will quell the boy’s fever and help him to stop vomiting.
We learn that Kevin didn’t sign up for fire-alert texts, potentially imperiling his mom and son. Chief Martinez seems to blame the fire on climate change.
The Lost Bus casts the Pacific Gas and Electric Company in a very bad light (as, in fairness, does history itself): Their faulty transmission lines ignited the blaze. And even when PG&E officials said they’ve cut the power to those lines, live cables fall and threaten the safety of fleeing residents, including Kevin’s bus. (The real PG&E filed for bankruptcy the year following the Camp Fire, pleading guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter and offering a $13.5 billion settlement offer to fire victims.)
We hear about Shaun throwing up.
Sometimes, we grow desensitized to disaster. We read the headlines, watch the reports, scan our newsfeeds. We shake our heads over the death and devastation left behind and turn our attention to the latest sports scores or Taylor Swift album.
You might have read about the incredible toll of the Camp Fire, which roared through northern California and destroyed the town of Paradise: the 153,000 acres burned, the 13,500 homes that were destroyed, the 85 people who lost their lives. But unless you were there, or knew someone who was, it’s hard to have any sort of inkling what the people there went through.
Movies can give us a sense of that inkling.
The Lost Bus is based on a true story, and it takes us on a harrowing ride through a flat-out inferno. And on that level, the film works. In a way, it potentially serves a purpose. As Paradise continues the long, arduous, expensive process of rebuilding, The Lost Bus may make us more understanding, more sympathetic to those impacted by the blaze.
But that understanding can come with its own cost.
The Lost Bus isn’t nearly as graphic as it could’ve been. It steers clear of the horrific toll the real Camp Fire surely exacted. In fact, it might’ve well snagged a PG-13 rating if it hadn’t been for its sporadic bursts of profanity. But The Lost Bus is still an intense, manipulative bit of moviemaking that forces us to watch kids fight for their lives.
For a lot of viewers, that may well be too much.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
