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Movie:		9.0
Picture:		7.0
Sound:		7.0
Extras:		6.0
Score:		7.0

Director(s):	Louie Psihoyos
Writer(s):	Mark Monroe
Starring:	Louie Psihoyos • Rick O'Barry
Genre:	Documentary • Thriller
Website:	http://www.thecovemovie.com/
Release Date:	December 08, 2009
Rated:

List Price:	DVD - $19.99
Amazon:

An environmentalist wake-up call that plays more like a paranoid thriller, this uncompromising, exhilarating expose of the whaling industry's dirty little secret, which many are tipping as the front runner for next year's Oscar, is a head-striking apple fallen from the "We're all doomed" branch of documentary filmmaking. Heading up this team of activists and filmmakers is Rick O'Barry, a former dolphin trainer who has dedicated the latter half of his life to blowing the whistle on the barbaric, hushed-up activities of the tiny coastal town of Taiji, where some 23,000 dolphins are rounded up annually so a handful can be chosen by trainers for theme parks and the rest butchered for their meat.

It's something of a cruel irony for O'Barry that he is perhaps the man most directly responsible for the very practice he is now so desperate to stop, and one that he is all too painfully aware of. Formerly the head trainer on the Flipper television series O'Barry had an epiphany when the show's primary dolphin, "Kathy," voluntarily stopped breathing in his arms in what he saw as a desperate act of escape from a tortured, miserable existence. Prior to the success of Flipper there were two Dolphinariums in the world, today it's a multi-billion dollar industry. As O'Barry painfully surmises with a lump in his throat: "I spent ten years building that industry up, and the last twenty-seven trying to tear it down."

Yet The Cove is far more than simply one craggy old nature lover's personal quest for redemption. Built like a heist movie, plotted along the lines of a men-on-a-mission actioner, the picture gradually snowballs into a sprawling global conspiracy involving the police force, the fishing industry, the media, and a handful of bankrupt and bribed Caribbean nations shielding Japan and the International Whaling Commission, all working together to cover up the terrible truth that the meat they're flogging is contaminated with toxic levels of mercury!

As director and longtime diving enthusiast Louis Psihoyos points out as the team is followed, intimidated, and harassed all over town by people employed to guard the secret of the cove, itself protected by high-fencing, razor wire, and 24-hour patrols, "We're not short of bad guys here. But in a way we're the bad guys too, because we let this happen." Gathering together a team of free-divers, logistical specialists, conservationists and, bizarrely, Industrial Light and Magic, O'Barry and his team launch a sting operation under the cover of darkness to infiltrate the tightly guarded cove and set-up high-tech surveillance equipment and catch the fisherman in the act.

The resulting footage is just devastating, and to their credit O'Barry and Psihoyo's dont milk it or dress it up. To be fair, they don't really need to as the simple sight of the entire bay turned from blue to bright red is more than sufficient to make the point. From there they track the meat to its various destinations where it is purposely mislabeled as high-end whale meat and fed to families and schoolchildren all over the country, millions of whom unknowingly sit down each night to dinner laced with poison.

Most staggering of all is the revelation that this is not exactly news to a great many people connected to the industry. Despite having felt the devastating effects of mercury poisoning back in the fifties, where the entire town of Minamata raised a generation of children blighted by birth defects, this has become a highly politicized issue of national pride for the Japanese. The once mighty imperial empire has seemingly chosen the whaling issue as a final line in the sand that it simply will not be dictated to over by the rest of the world.

While it is difficult to see The Cove as anything other than a victory for the activists and a triumph of documentary filmmaking, it's hard to escape the quiet sense of desperation that persists as you're left to ponder the mountainous level of human stupidity involved. Faced with the sheer, undeniable madness of it all it's tough to move beyond the realization that not only are we as a species absolutely going to kill ourselves, one way or another, but that we're going to do so seemingly with our eyes wide open.

DVD Bonus Features

Extras include a feature length chat track with director Louie Psihoyos and producer Fisher Stevens. Also included is the documentary short Mercury Rising, which details just how rampant and widespread the issue of mercury poisoning is within global fishing stocks. The disc also includes a smattering of deleted scenes, several short behind the scenes clips and the original theatrical trailer.