Paul Greengrass, one of the last and greatest of the cinema’s action auteurs, stages, shoots and edits the hell out of “The Lost Bus,” turning a conventional enough “true story” of children trapped on a schoolbus in a raging wildfire into a minor epic.

It’s about something that happened in the horrific Camp Fire that devoured Paradise, California and environs and killed 85 people in 2018. A blaze lit in a stiff breeze swept down on thousands before many knew what was happening, and a bus sent to evacuate school kids to safety got lost in the smoke and flames.

Greengrass, the director of “United 93” and “Captain Phillips” and the best of the “Bourne” thrillers, takes us into the inferno and the race to fight or flee it in a tale told at a breathless sprint, almost from start to finish.

The story may be old fashioned “Disaster of the Week” TV movie generic. But Greengrass elevates it to pulse-pounding thriller art.

Matthew McConaughey plays Kevin McKay, a townie who left Paradise and came back — one busted marriage, one surly teen son and one aged mother later. He’s driving a school bus and barely hanging onto that job thanks to family distractions. His dad died not long back, his mother is getting up there in years, the kid is getting on his last nerve and the day before the worst happens, his aged dog has to be put down.

And then those poorly-maintained, slow-to-be-shut down Pacific Gas & Electric high-tension lines lose an insulator in a stiffening breeze. Sparks become flames and a brush fire turns into an inferno in the climate-change baked and wind-blasted mountains and canyons.

Not a good day for Kevin’s son to get sick and act-out by not answering his phone.

“I wanna go live with Mom!”

Ashlie Atkinson is Ruby, the school bus dispatcher who’s reached the “I don’t care” stage of Kevin’s excuses. But his “family emergency” stop offs and delays in getting bus 693 into the maintenance shed mean that he’s the only driver in a position to evac the last kids from a school about to be swept over.

America Ferrara is Mary Ludwig, the teacher determined to get the 22 kids “into two straight lines,” , remind them to “keep calm” and follow “procedure” just long enough to ensure that their window to escape all but closes. She’s armtwisted onto the bus to manage the children while Kevin tries to outsmart crushing traffic and the fire racing towards Paradise to get them to safety.

And Yul Vazquez of “Captain Phillips” and TV’s “Succession” is Chief Martinez, the professional but overwelmed Cal Fire commander whose hope to “Let’s knock this out before it becomes something” come to naught.

Greengrass moves us to the edge of our seats with technique — hand-held cameras swirling through the chaos, extreme jumpy close ups of his sweating and panting stars letting us see the fear and panic and fire’s-eye-view tracking shots of the blaze as it swoops its way from an inaccessible origin point down into the towns and villages of this corner of California.

You know what you’re seeing can’t be real and has to be CGI augmented with smoke and flashes of real flames blended in. But Greengrass and his effects team do a grand job of faking it. Somebody on this production must have seen the eerie and hellish dashcam drive through a Siberian forest fire scenes of “The Road Movie” documentary of a few years back. This is that realistic.

But that’s what you get when you hire the best action director out there for your formulaic disaster made-for-TV movie. “The Lost Bus” takes that weary formula, lets the player grab our empathy and then just plain dazzles us with the inferno the filmmakers light.

Greengrass sees to it that Apple gets a movie so well-crafted that they’ll regret not opening it in theaters.

Rating: R, people burning, scenes of children in peril, profanity

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrara, Ashlie Atkinson and Yul Vazquez

Credits: Directed by Paul Greengrass, scripted by Brad Ingelsby and Paul Greengrass, based on a book by Lizzie Johnson. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 2:10