Swimming with the Dolphins

For a few months now, I've been hearing good things about the recent documentary The Cove. And then it scored an Oscar nomination a few weeks back, and seems to be considered the "front runner" in the category. I decided to check it out and see for myself.

It's a film that looks at a particular location in a particular town in Japan, a notorious site for the capture and slaughter of dolphins. The film overall is a look at the Japanese whaling and dolphin hunting industry, with a particular lens on this one hidden cove, out of sight from the public, where dolphins are herded in large groups for brutal slaughter. The makers of the film run a sort of guerrilla operation trying to get secret cameras and sound equipment into the cove so that they can prove the existence of the rumored killing field, and reveal that the killings of the dolphins happens in much greater numbers -- and not at all as humanely -- as people might want to believe.

The film turns out to be surprisingly suspenseful, and has a good deal more going on in it than the simple "save the cetaceans"-type message you might expect. It all stems from the "secret mission" vibe. At times, it plays like a sort of real-life (but low budget) episode of Alias or Mission: Impossible or some such, watching this coordinated team trying to sneak in somewhere and plant listening devices of a sort.

It also has compelling "characters." You get to learn about the man who used to train all the dolphins for the television show Flipper, now a staunch crusader against keeping dolphins in captivity. You meet the special effects artists enlisted to create ways of camouflaging cameras and microphones. Even the filmmakers themselves are personalities in their own movie. In short, though the film may be a documentary, the people and plot of it all provides a lot of the entertainment value of a scripted drama.

But where the movie falls down just a bit is in conveying its truly intended message. It doesn't educate as well as it entertains, if you will. I think the filmmakers grew so close to their cause in the making of the piece that they lost a little objectivity. For them, their film's message seems manifestly obvious. And arguably, by the end of the movie, you'll see and feel that too. But getting to that ending? I was less convinced.

The movie really seems to just take it as a given that from the first minute, you -- like they -- are 100% on board with the cause of saving the cetaceans. Personally, though the cause might indeed be just, I started with the feeling that it was a little 1980s. And I might even consider myself on the more receptive end of the spectrum. If you're the sort of person to consider this "tree hugger crap," the movie doesn't really make much of an effort to persuade you. Perhaps the filmmakers assume such a person won't watch their movie anyway. Or perhaps they assume that once they obtain this footage they hope to capture, that it will simply speak for itself.

In any case, I did still find the movie rather enjoyable. I'd rate it a B-.