Four years ago, The Cove shocked audiences with its footage of the brutal dolphin hunt in Taiji, Japan. This year saw another deeply troubling documentary featuring marine mammals, but in this one, it’s Seaworld that is indicted for its dishonest and horrific treatment of its captive whales. It’s the type of movie that will fill you with righteous anger, which for some will translate into insufferable self-righteousness but for many others an anger that could lead to action and real life results. Or at least that’s the effect the filmmakers would like the movie to have.
Documentaries like Blackfish are often referred to, pejoratively at times, as single-issue movies, or preachy films, but I fail to see a weakness in a film with such an intense focus, and at least an interest in a fair assessment of the organization it’s seeking to interrogate. Its look at SeaWorld’s treatment of its captive orca entertainers goes directly to the trainers most familiar with the facilities’ practices and the ways those practices run counter to the actual safety of its staff, not to mention the animals. It’s heavy on emotion, but the purportedly intellectual counterarguments to the movie’s claims seem far less persuasive than the testimonies from the subjects themselves.
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