23,000 Lives (now on Netflix) is one of the rare sub-sects of the BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie genre: a BOATS movie with actual boats in it. In this case, one specific vessel is the focus, the Iuventa, an aging jalopy of a ship fixed up by some enterprising young Germans in 2016 so they could brave the rough waters of the Mediterranean to save the lives of African refugees on life rafts. We’ve all seen the horrifying photos of rafts overloaded with desperate migrants, a hair’s breadth from capsizing, and the organization known as Jugend Rettet (rough translation: Youth Saves) vowed to do something about it — and they ended up being the subject of trumped-up allegations of smuggling and trafficking in Italy. This is a dramatization of their wild story.
23,000 LIVES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: It’s 2015. Thousands of refugees crossed the Mediterranean to escape African countries devastated by war or overrun by brutal terrorist gangs and militias. Some made it, many more drowned during the journey. Enough survived to fill European migrant centers to the brim –—and then some — prompting countries to close their borders. Lukas (Louis Hofmann), a young 20-something grocery clerk, sees these stories on the news, and watches a struggling refugee mother tell her children they can’t afford a soccer ball in the supermarket. He brings a food donation from the store to the center and gives those same kids the ball they wanted. Lukas’s life seems a little aimless as he stocks shelves and scans produce at the checkout, while his roommates Nina (Katharina Stark) and Mauro (Felice), and his girlfriend Kitty (Mala Emde), attend university. Having witnessed the refugees’ plight both first- and secondhand, he finds his focus: acquire a ship and launch a humanitarian rescue organization.
This is when the montages begin in earnest. First, there’s a doing-research montage. Then, a drumming-up-support montage. The third one will come after Lukas visits a bank and a rep says, “This is not a charity,” and then visits a charity and a rep says, “This is not a bank.” He’s called naive and is feeling discouraged when, one morning, Nina jumps on board. She believes in his mission and comes up with the name Jugend Rettet. Mauro also wants to help, and they find a communications student, Dominique (Luisa-Celine Gaffron), to handle public relations, and everyone is passionate and I believe all part of the third montage, the Youthful Exuberance Montage, but I’m not sure because the montages tend to run together a bit. They find a wealthy benefactor to pony up for a ship, fix it up (in the Fixing It Up Montage, natch), christen it, crew up — Soren (Frederick Lau) leads the rescues and Viola (Maria Dragus) is captain and Su (Saibon Wang) is the doctor — and take to the sea.
The first mission of the Iuventa goes well. The group pulls dozens of refugees off a raft, including a mother, Rose (Kathy Etoa), and her six-month-old baby, and an upbeat young gentleman, Lamin (Trevor Magaya), who Lukas befriends. Will these two characters turn up later in the film when it needs them? Hope so, since those two actors give the best performances in the film. There’s a bit of a comedown once Lukas and co. get the refugees to safety, and a celebration, and then another montage — “the More Rescues Montage” — leading to an incident that’s terribly sad and greatly affects Lukas and Mauro’s psychological state. They return home traumatized. Mauro has panic attacks and Lukas has bad dreams and drifts away from Kitty, who has remained committed to their studies this whole time. She speaks conceptually about humanitarian issues, while he toils selflessly on the frontlines. Things don’t go smoothly on land as Jugend Rettet faces inevitable political pushback from ideologues, some of whose power translates to roadblocks and detours and red tape for the Iuventa as it searches the horizon for refugee vessels. Helping people isn’t easy or simple in a world that often feels upside-down.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? There are a couple of Captain Phillips-style moments here. And we just watched the HBO documentary The Welcome Table, a segment of which addresses the exact same story about how European governments actively fight back — in both courtrooms and in the water — against rescue missions in the Mediterranean.
Performance Worth Watching: Hofmann ably handles being the heart of the narrative – he’s rock-solid as an idealist who frequently faces the challenges of reality. But Etoa and Magaya are flat-out great in their brief screen time, functioning as the emotional hooks that draw us into the story.
Sex And Skin: None.
Our Take: Yeah, 23,000 Lives begins and ends with montages, with plenty of montages in the middle, creating a montage sandwich composed wholly out of montages (so I guess by strict definition it’s not a montage sandwich at all, but a well-organized pile of montages). This isn’t necessarily a criticism. The technique allows the film to cover a lot of narrative ground while moving along at a nice clip. Director Markus Goller and screenwriters Oliver Ziegenbalg and Michele Cinque nicely balance the big-picture drama of a life-or-death international dilemma with the smaller-scale drama of the characters’ personal lives. If they had leaned into the former, they’d have produced a chilly procedural; had they leaned into the latter, they might’ve risked emphasizing the travails of relatively privileged people.
So that balance is key, and any criticisms of the sometimes generic tone and structure of the story are smoothed over by its earnestness. Goller is a skilled and detailed filmmaker who knows when to back off the gas and let a scene play out, whether it’s a moment of disconnect between Kitty and Lukas, a tense rescue sequence, or a lovely exchange between Lamin and Lukas. There are times when the screenplay risks being a checklist of incidents we wholly expect to see: a triumphant rescue, a quiet interlude with a refugee, an arduous rescue, run-ins with pirates, run-ins with politicians, etc. And it concludes in a hasty fashion, lest it veer into courtroom-drama territory, which would compromise its uptempo approach.
Admirably driven by significant on-location shoots, 23,000 Lives is a strong drama despite its somewhat transparent narrative calculations, e.g., debates about the immediacy of saving lives vs. the big picture of cooperating with authorities who can shut down the entire endeavor. The movie does not seek to revolutionize this type of rah-rah BOATS narrative, but that makes it easier for us to, you know, get on board. It may not rock the boat, but the moments when the literal boat rocks draw us in and keep us there.
Our Call: Earnest uplift balanced with some of the more difficult realities of refugee rescues makes 23,000 Lives a worthy watch. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.