Film Review: The Cove (2009)

There are some films that make you so bitter and self-loathing about your own inaction, and The Cove, the Academy Award winning documentary from 2009, was one such film. I had no idea what exactly this film was about, and I really assumed that it was some nature doc in the vein of Oceans. I couldn't have been more painfully wrong, and as I revisit 2009, I keep finding how little informed I was about that particular year in film. For those not in the know, The Cove isn't about the ocean or any particular reef, and it isn't some boring feature focusing on the lives of animals. It's about the abuse and systematic murder of dolphins that occurs each and every year.

You'd think that something that important is something you would've heard about before, but atrocities like these are never known until they are shown right before you. The protagonist and hero of this story is Ric O'Barry, the man who captured five dolphins for the original Flipper television series. At this age, you could easily see him as a crazy and paranoid old man, and at the start of the film there was that illusion. However, once you see the injustice that is going on in Taiji, Wakayama, Japan. Each September, dolphin drive hunting commences as thousands of dolphins are either captured or slaughtered by Taiji fishermen.

So why is this going on so effectively without the government's concern? Because dolphins happen to be a major market for most people, both in aquatic parks like SeaWorld, and in the food industry. Dolphins are actually sold as meat, and the Japanese government is either blind to these events, or they're participating in the cover-up. These are the sorts of things that can turn your view of the world upside down without the slightest hesitation. Hayden Panettiere, star of the great-then-abysmal superhero series Heroes, was one of the activists arrested in a failed attempt to capture the Taiji slaughters on camera. So much for those preconceptions about a person.

Even more than an expose on human cruelty towards dolphins and their like, The Cove is an intense espionage thriller about a group tasked to go out to the secluded Taiji cove in the middle of the night, and plant cameras to capture this injustice as it's happening. O'Barry and director Louis Psihoyos contact people from Industrial Light and Magic to disguise the cameras as believable rocks, or other environmental objects. That is pretty much the most noble and worthy thing a person in that job could ever do. This is a documentary that's so steeped in the world of the film industry that it's subconscious to the viewers.

The footage they capture at the cove is almost unbearable to watch. This is without a doubt one of the most tragic and depressing films I've ever seen, and when people talk about the intelligence of dolphins, they shrug it off. The idea of a dolphin committing suicide sounds ridiculous to most people, but if we're capable of it, why not them? These aren't just animals, because they've shown an ability for intelligence in captivity, when they're most depressed and miserable. I'd wager that they're smarter than people, because they realize what they have and what they need, whereas we don't.

Any of the best documentary features needs a sort of driving narrative force, without which it feels somewhat incomplete. The best examples of such are Man on Wire or Exit Through the Gift Shop. Films like Waiting for Superman and Inside Job are simply lacking that, and as a result aren't as influential. The Cove is certainly one of the most impactful films I've ever seen, and it makes me angry at myself more than anyone. This is the sort of thing that should be enraging people to barge onto the Taiji reserve guns-a-blazing and tear the place apart. It's radical, and I'm far too much of a coward to even free a dolphin from an aquarium, but something has to be done. I feel terrible that I'm not brave enough to do anything about it. A phone call doesn't make any difference. Not in the long run.

A+