The Red Sea Diving Resort

Twenty-for-Seven #20 (Day7)
2019, d. Gideon Raff - Netflix

I'm out of movie-watching shape.  Trying to cram 20 movies into 7 days was actually kind of exhausting (I had to give up on the idea of actually writing up reviews as I went).  While I have a list of things I want to watch, most of them are on the list for academic reasons, which often require access to other films that aren't on streaming services I'm subscribed to..I pay enough for these that paying for one-off rentals isn't going to happen...as such I've become a slave to these services.  On each of these services I have lists, largely unmaintained, of things that caught my eye when doing one of those brain dead meanders through what they offer.  It's a mind numbing experience trying to select a film to watch.  There's too much choice, which often leads to indecision.

I watched most of the 20-4-7 on my own, the wife had a game night out one night, and was down with a bad cold one of the others, and often she was in bed sleeping while I was up in the wee hours of the morning cramming in another picture or two.  So I think of the first 19, she watched 5 1/2 with me (she went to bed during Dolemite as the cold was knocking her out).  So with #20, I let it be her choice (so kind, I know), as I had hit the wall and couldn't make a decision.  She wanted a Chris Evans fix, so The Red Sea Diving Resort became #20.

This is a film "based on true events", a statement that I think needs to be retired from filmmaking altogether.  The moment anything is "based on a true story", I think the viewer starts picking at the logic of a film, starts looking for inaccuracies or discrepancies or questioning how certain situations could have possibly played out or be known to have happened.  It just opens up a quagmire of questions or concerns about veracity, and I think it ruins films, and ruins one's experience with a film.

Anything that wants to be based on a true story, or true events, shouldn't mention such a thing until the end of a film, if at all.  Starting your film with that caption is, to me, the worst way to ope any movie that isn't a documentary.

With The Red Seas Diving Resort, I went in knowing nothing about the movie...except my vague memory of the trailer which seemed to scream "white savior narrative" to me, one of my least favourite genres.

Evans plays Ari Levinson, a Mossad agent who has been working with Kadebe Bimro (Michael Kenneth Williams) to evacuate targeted Ethiopian Jews and bring them to safe harbor in Israel.  Levinson is intrinsically invested in his mission, so when he's recalled due to the increasing dangers in the region, he diligently works to find some other way to carry on with his mission.  He comes up with using the cover of a resort in neighboring Sudan (which has been taking in the refugees) to help smuggle the Ethiopians out to Israel, and upon securing funding and approval, he puts together a team.

Now the corrupt Sudanese government of the film want to increase tourism so, despite never actually wanting to actually operate the resort, the government pushes tourism towards them and they find it actually helps with their cover.

There are tensions as the Sudanese military start to catch on to the dwindling numbers in various refugee camps, (which impacts the refugee aide they receive from the world stage), so the team starts operating under high alert, before ultimately having to pull out, but not before making one last export with the help of US officials.

This honestly wasn't as intense of distressing as I had thought it might be.  The film seems to diminish the severity of the cause by focusing more on the Mossad agents than the people in need.  Williams is almost a non-presence throughout most of the middle act (despite the poster's inference that "one partnership saved thousands of lives", that partnership isn't really given much weight on screen).

The "white savior" criticism of the film, I think, is diminished by the fact that it's Israeli agents working to save marginalized Jewish Ethiopians...it's more about the religion than race.  But that's not to say the film still doesn't have it's problems, like placing non-Israeli, or at least non-Jewish actors in some of these roles, and also not giving more point-of-view to Kadebe Bimro's story. 

It's also particularly upsetting finding out that the Sudanese government and secret police weren't actually adversaries in this operation, but actually secretly aided in the migration (until word started getting out to the larger Muslim region).  This is another problem I have with "based on true events", the inference to the audience is that the events are true, when the probability is the entire story is a made up script base of the concept of what happened in reality. 

The film has its entertainment value (and Evans without his shirt), but it doesn't feel like one with modern sensibilities.