Summary
23,000 Lives is doubtlessly well-intentioned and timely, but it’s also regrettably surface-level and preachy in its approach.
Now is either the best or the worst time for a sincere and deeply empathetic drama about refugees, immigration, and the callous, self-serving disregard shown to suffering human beings by national governments. Mere weeks after the abominable Citizen Vigilante argued that all immigrants should be killed, Netflix’s 23,000 Lives makes the opposite case – that nobody takes a dinghy into the Mediterranean unless they’re fleeing life-or-death circumstances, and that rescuing them is a human imperative, not an act of political defiance.
The difference is that while Uwe Boll’s monstrous movie only claimed to be about a very real and pressing issue, Markus Goller’s is explicitly based on a fascinatingly bleak but ultimately hopeful true story. The NGO Jugend Rettet, or “Youth Saved”, was established by idealistic young people to rescue refugees stranded in the Mediterranean. They saved 23,000 people across a period of years, risking their own lives in dangerous sea missions, and as a reward, they were charged with trafficking, among other trumped-up crimes, faced with 20 years in prison and a fine of 15,000 Euros per each person they brought into Italy.
The case was a scandal, and rightly so, but the righteous ire underpinning this movie contributes to a preachy vibe from which it never quite escapes. For what it’s worth, I’m on board with its message, but my job is to critique movies, and this one, however well-intentioned, is disappointingly surface-level in its efforts to condense a multi-year case into a sub-two-hour runtime. The script from Goller’s regular screenwriter, Oliver Ziegenbalg, knows the argument it’s trying to make, but it uses the real-life people involved with “Youth Saved” and its rescue ship Iuventa as mouthpieces for the talking points, skimming away some of the humanity that girded their endeavour.
It’s also a movie of two distinct halves. The first is lighter and finds what would become the crew of the Iuventa, primarily through our point-of-view character, Lukas (Louis Hofmann, Dark), beginning their odyssey for noble reasons, and with the help of well-intentioned private citizens and organisations. In lieu of governmental backing, the vessel was purchased by a well-to-do couple (Corinna Harfouch, Ulrich Matthes), while the German Film Academy rented office space and a Maltese lighthouse was offered up as a base free of charge. Early missions were successful, with hundreds of grateful refugees being pulled from inflatables, provided life vests, and taken aboard the Iuventa to be resettled elsewhere.
While not without issues, including some pretty heavy ones, emotionally speaking, these early missions provide proof of concept for Jugend Rettet’s mission. This makes the midpoint lurch into more hostile territory even more shocking. Gradually, anti-immigrant sentiment becomes overwhelming. The crew of the Iuventa is harassed by locals, and the Italian government keeps putting increasingly insurmountable roadblocks in the way of their efforts. They’re accused of colluding with smugglers and inviting waves of immigrants into Europe. Eventually, they’re essentially entrapped, locked in a sham trial for a length of time and a degree of expense that, a postscript informs us, could have saved many thousands more lives if redirected properly.
The morality is so clear-cut here – it’d be absurd for any thinking person to claim that preventing human beings from drowning is anything other than a positive thing – that the preachy attitude of 23,000 Lives is understandable, but it makes for a clunky movie. All of the characters speak in summarized talking points as if they’re trying to justify themselves on the stand long before they get there. The refugees who are rescued are cartoonishly friendly and sympathetic; there’s a recurring character, the first Lukas saved, who periodically calls him throughout the movie to reiterate what a great life he’s making for himself and how thankful he is to Lukas for allowing him the opportunity to do so. This may well be true, but the way it’s presented feels nakedly like a tool, the implication being that every refugee saved went on to live a similarly productive life. Indeed, many of the rescued men and women testified on behalf of the Iuventa’s crew, strongly influencing their eventual acquittal on all charges.
Thanks to the movie’s extremely narrow focus, there’s no counterpoint to any of this, so it feels less organic than I’d like. It also strips away some of the more potentially interesting subtext about at what point human instinct overrides government policy; about whether, and to what extent, moral imperative justifies disobeying the law. The crew of the Iuventa are presented as being so unequivocally right, and the Italian government so cartoonishly villainous, that the simplistic moral debate completely overwhelms any logistical or political concerns. It’s an admirable viewpoint that just feels as if it isn’t all that reflective of reality, the fact-based nature of the story notwithstanding.
Still, if we’re going to get one-sided message movies about refugees and immigration, 23,000 Lives is the kind I’d prefer we got. It’ll attract ire simply for being pro-refugee in a climate where hatred and fearmongering are more prevalent than ever, and it’ll doubtlessly become caught in the web of an endlessly vitriolic culture war for these reasons. The downside is that I don’t think it’s quite a good enough movie to stand up against the kind of scrutiny it’s likely to get.
