A Completely Dishonest Documentary (as The Cove was by the way)
A documentary is supposed to document and inform but this film is
just the opposite of what a documentary should be. Among the most
ridiculous things of the film:
- Instead of focusing on one aspect, the documentary goes in circle
presenting all the ways we as humans are managing to destroy the Earth
ecosystem. It presents points already made by several other
documentaries but without stating anything new.
- It presents some valid points about what's wrong with the way we
treat animals, and how we have screwed up at a global scale, but when it
comes to finger pointing at actual people, they prefer to go blame some
remote village of Indonesia where people hunt manta rays in order to
survive as they find it difficult to grow plants in there. The message
seems to be: the world is screwed but let's start fixing it by ruining
some countryside people's livelihood. Killing manta rays is wrong, they
are cute, they are innocent, but leaving people starve and live in poor
conditions, that's fine. Who cares?
- In the same village, they show these fishermen go out fishing on
their little boat, struggling to catch the manta, doing everything with
their bare hands, and audience is supposed to feel sad? The commentator
even tries to convince us that we should be disgusted by the fact that the
fisherman kills the manta by sticking a long knife in its brain.
Perhaps, for the wealthy western commentator, it is easier just to walk in
the supermarket, buy his plastic-packaged minced meat of an animal that
he never saw alive, doesn't know in what miserable conditions it lived and
doesn't even know how it was killed. That hunting scene actually just makes
one respecting more these fishermen.
- Shall we talk about the white guy that saves a poor manta ray caught
into a fishnet or something? Oh yes, he is the big hero. So
cheesy. Cheesy as the director being interviewed and crying in front of
the camera. Actually that's not cheesy, that's just dishonest. I don't
doubt that he was crying for real, but you are the director of the film
for god sake. You should be honest enough to leave that part out.
- Why this kind of activist documentaries are always one sided? They
find all the possible western people to interview to support their
statement, but they cannot get some Asian experts to stand up for the
poor people?
- If killing whales and dolphins is wrong, why before traveling to the
East, they don't travel within the USA (Alaska for example) or Northern
Europe? Perhaps because they speak English, are well educated, and it
is going to be more difficult to sell their dishonest activism?
- When it comes to criticize the western society, they use some stock
footage or they leave it to the commentator to describe how bad the
western world is. But when it's about China or Indonesia, they use
cheap tricks of hidden cameras to film poor and uneducated people that
don't know how to defend themselves with words as they obviously are
not able to debate and express their point of view with clarity. Why
they don't go bother the big western corporations with hidden cameras
and annoying interviews?
- In fact, why they don't even bother dubbing the interviewed Asian
people but leave it to unreadable white subtitles on white background?
- Towards the end, the documentary turns out to be just an
advertisement campaign for Tesla cars. And be clear, I support Tesla
and would love to own one, but it just felt like Tesla came out of the
blue. There was no point to put it in the film in my opinion.
Environmental activism is a good thing. Especially with the filmmaking support.
But when one does it with intellectual dishonesty, it does more harm than good.