1. Avatar – James Cameron's twelve-years-in-the-making, special effects vehicle found critical and box office success that hasn't been seen since the former's last film, Titanic. This is a great film for those who wish to simply go to a cinema, empty their minds, sit back, and enjoy the pretty moving pictures that apparently jump out at them.  The CGI is visually stunning, and it is plain to see why Cameron waited for a decade before making a film as ambitious as this.  If you compare this aesthetically to his last film, or even to other special effects-driven films released this year, such as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, there is a marked difference in quality.  I think it is safe to say that James Cameron has successfully changed the way special effects are used and studied for the better, much like the Wachowski brothers did ten years earlier with The Matrix. That said, I feel that this film has little else going for it. The acting was mediocre at best, and although for Avatar's protagonist Jake Sully, Sam Worthington's American accent has largely improved from Terminator Salvation, he puts in a fairly wooden performance as a paraplegic marine whose mind is transferred into a genetically engineered mongrel alien, with the goal to.....do.....something.  The supporting cast members also give sub-par performances, from Sigourney Weaver "Paycheck? OK!" as the subtly-named Dr Grace Augustine to Giovanni Ribisi's average turn as Paul Reiser from Aliens.  The hackneyed story and the film's overall themes are treated with the touch of a rapist by Cameron.  At various points in the film, Worthington actually stares into the camera and explains exactly what is happening, YouTube video-blog style.  This is done in such a way to shows us that Cameron can't write a story that can explain itself - he needs the characters to tell us, face-to-face.  The political themes that run through the film are drawn in far too broad strokes.  It can be an anti-imperialist, anti-American, anti-Terrorism film.  His clumsy attempts at tackling these issues show us that he is nowhere near as deep as his 3-D technology. It's like a more obvious attempt at a Zoolander-style hypnosis session: NATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT GOOOD, MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS AND IMPERIALISM BAAAD!!!!!  Overall, would I say that this is a good film?  Yes - it's enjoyable and a fun way to spend a few hours - the CGI is THAT good.  Is it an Oscar contender?  For Best Picture, far from it.  However, Avatar is a worthy candidate for some technical awards.

2. Up - In true Pixar tradition, Directors Peter Docter and Bob Peterson have taken a strange and seemingly impossible premise and created yet another great film (seriously, can you imagine the pitch? "OK guys, our next film will be about a 78-year old man who ties balloons to his house and goes to explore South America with an eight-year-old boy!") The film expertly blends an intelligent story with family-friendly entertainment, patching up any generation gaps that might exist between it's viewers. The opening 10 minutes of this film are easily the best, and most touching, of the film. They depict Carl Fredrickson (Ed Asner)'s happy life with his wife in a montage of small moments, mirrored compromises, and love demonstrated, not told.  The film then unfolds into an exploration of self, taking chances and loving people despite their flaws. Typical for Pixar, Up resonates without ever becoming sappy.  Although it is generally a great film, when the first ten minutes are done so well, you spend the rest of the film waiting for moments that will top those at the start, which could leave you with a tinge of disappointment.  A safe bet for Best Animated Feature, I do not think that this film should win Best Picture, although it is definitely a worthy nominee.

4. The Blind Side –  This film is about a homeless African-American boy who becomes an all-American football player with the help of a rich white woman.  It is supposedly Sandra Bullock’s Oscar-winning role.  Generally the Academy awards actors who try to do something outside of their usual acting wheelhouse, or who give their character some kind of quirk or fault that ups the degree of difficulty -  think of Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote mimicking Truman Capote’s distinctive voice.  Sandra Bullock’s quirk in The Blind Side is her deep south American accent, which began to grate twenty minutes into the film.  Apparently her character Leigh Anne Tuohy is a sassy, take-no-shit, um, interior decorator. The only way I could have guessed that she’s a woman who gets what she wants is that every other character seems to say so.  Without Sandra Bullock, this movie would just be a made-for-TV-movie.  The main character, Michael Oher, is portrayed as a bumbling idiot who has never played football before the age of 16 or 17.  Upon viewing the movie, the real Michael Oher said this was incorrect and he actually was an experienced footballer before he moved in with Sandra Bullock’s family.  Ultimately, it’s a good TV movie released for people who don’t like sports.

5. The Hurt Locker – The Hurt Locker is about a bomb squad in Iraq.  Even though it’s about an American military bombsquad in Iraq, there’s no heavy-handed, overlying political message.  Unless its a Team America sequel, the last thing I want is another "America, Fuck Yeah" film.  The film is about the people doing their job, and that job is to defuse bombs.  The situation highlights the difficulty of their lives, but it's not to do with the difficulty of their problems with the enemy.  The fact that there are few famous people in this film, allows the actors to melt into the roles in a way that someone like Tom Cruise in the leading role could not.  The bomb-defusing scenes are suitably tense, but they’re not actually the focal point of the movie.  Instead, the film explores the main character’s attitude towards his job, and through it, his life.  Most war films deal with the human cost of war and what it takes from a person.  All the soldiers want to do is go home to their families, to get out of the hell that they've been sent to.  The Hurt Locker shows us what war gives back; there is a gradual realisation that the main character loves his job more than his life, and that is one of the most developed themes of the year.  Ultimately, this film provides a healthy juxtaposition to the director’s ex-husband’s blue film: one examines humans in a politically charged situation with deep commentary; the other uses cartoon characters to hamfistedly explain the director's prejudices.   

By Christopher Carr

Rowan Atkinson's Na'vi

SPOILER ALERT: If you didn't guess from the title, this review trashes Avatar.  If you still want to enjoy the film, don't bother reading it.  Let's skip over Pocahontas, Dances with Wolves, Ferngully, and all that really funny, funny stuff, because that's played out like a Jheri Curl.  Instead, lets explore the less-covered ground of why the movie really sucks: its crude, ham-fisted politics, invidious racism, crappy animation, unfortunate impact on film-making, and hackneyed unoriginality.   

James Cameron's self-righteous injection of partisan politics and one-dimensional morality that is the story of Avatar is ponderous, underhanded, and due to the whopping success of the film, destined to make us all dumber.  The RDA mining corporation, run by a character named Parker Selfridge, is represented as profit-motivated and evil, willing to do whatever it takes - including genocide - for uncertain returns.  The clash between the Na'vi (Honestly, what's with the breath mark?  An umlaut seemed too pretentious?) and RDA reminds me of the simplistic good versus evil narrative of most comic books, where the superhero is endowed by some sort of natural or spiritual deus ex machina and battles the evil forces of - inevitably - a wealthy businessman or scientist.  As Avatar has all the thematic complexity of a bad comic book, it's hard to see it as the masterpiece twelve-years-in-the-making it's been hailed as, and not as the product of the decadent final stages of a pervasive Hollywood meme.  I wonder if director Cameron was so lost in focus groups, financial projections, and delusions of grandeur (He is the King of the World after all.) that he failed to realize his film treats adults like morally incompetent losers in a Spurlockian fashion.  In the words of Turtle from Entourage, "“James Cameron, baby! This could be the worst piece-of-shit movie ever and it’ll still make a billion dollars.”

Avatar, like all superhero narratives, relies on a dichotomy between archetypical good and evil characters, in this case juiced-up with ham-fisted parallels to real-world events, that reveal emptily antagonistic politics.  The evil Earth-raping corporatists are after "unobtanium" - a complete MacGuffin; they need to "fight terror with terror" and "shock and awe", when really what the humans should be doing is painting with all the colors of the wind.  

No doubt, in the future - as in the past and present - political issues will be controversial, nuanced, and layered.  Consider Cameron's metaphor of evil resource extraction: without fossil fuels humans would be living in the dark ages and harvesting turnips - not discovering the secrets of genomic medicine and communicating via the internet.  Resources are AWESOME.  Even now fossil fuels are the most cost-efficient way for the poorest people in the world to rise above subsistence.  Of course, there are dire consequences of burning fossil fuels that must be considered when formulating wise policy, but the point is that resource extraction is anything but simple.  Although I sympathize with the premise of minimal resource use and investments in renewable energy, Avatar is decidedly one-sided: there is not even a cursory glance at the economic or social causes of RDA's rapacious resource extraction, and the humble miners are presented as monolithic bad guys.  No one thinks they are evil; Hitler, Stalin and Mao all thought they were serving the greater good.  In real life, there are often clear instances of good versus evil, but I find it hard to believe that the bad guys embrace destruction and violence to the degree shown in Avatar; I prefer to think they are tragically captivated by the righteousness of their own ideas, much like James Cameron.

The parallels with Star Wars cannot be ignored either.  It's unfortunate that talented and respected film directors repeatedly sacrifice story to grand sensationalism, special effects, and marketability ("There will be an Avatar II!").  George Lucas's first film after graduating from USC film school was THX 1138 - in my opinion one of the greatest films ever made.  Like Lucas, Cameron has used the success of the provocative and intelligent, low-budget Terminator to essentially make money via the lowest common denominator in storytelling: the oversimplified good versus evil narrative.  I wonder however, whether directors like Lucas and Cameron are to blame, or whether the blame is properly placed on a society that rewards empty flash with ticket sales.  In the words of Woody Allen, and it pains me to say this, "Thank God the French exist."  Although even the French love Avatar.

The stupidity of the story isn't the worst part.  The film is extremely, uncomfortably racist. While, thankfully there aren't any real-life Na'vi who had to sit through it, the fact remains that Avatar plays to the cheap seats.  I felt more respect and pathos for the barbarian holding a severed head at the beginning of Gladiator than I did for a bunch of naked, self-righteous hippies dancing: after the death of Magua, of course the Na'vi make the human their leader!  Of course only the human can tame the Toruk!  And while that sounds like a masturbation euphemism, we're simply a superior race, even when we use our superiority to promote equality.  This is the underlying tenet of the soft, liberal racism of the left - more invidious than its clumsy counterpart on the right.  

The well-meaning racism of Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, and Avatar sees race and ethnicity as a determinant of everything: if it weren't for the one conscious-having human/European, the poor, stupid minorities would be overwhelmed by innate technological and cultural superiority without even realizing anything was going on at all.  Avatar's liberal heroine's solution to the threat posed to the natives by her peoples' "natural superiority" is to enlist the Na'vi in American schools and give them English names so they can learn about civilization, when perhaps the Na'vi would prefer to be left alone.  Above all, this form of Noble Savage racism is unable to sacrifice its worldview centered on snug superiority, even if that superiority is manifest in apparent extensions of equality.

Well, so what?  I didn't go to see Avatar for the story, you might say.  I went for the cutting-edge film-making and special effects.  After all, in the same way as Lord of the Rings was a story to show off the elvish culture and language that J.R.R. Tolkien created, Avatar is an empty vessel for Cameron to utilize in showcasing the 3-D CGI technology that will change film-making.  Unfortunately, the animation was disappointing too.  Once again, I felt as though I was watching the film version of a comic book, and once the shock of the 3-D wears off, I'm confident that we'll all look back at Avatar like we now do at Hammer pants and wonder what the hell we were thinking.  Animators still haven't found a way to make their craft work in three dimensions.  The exaggerated facial expressions and body language present in Vaudeville-era Disney animation are still the norm for two dimensions, and, if we are to continue with three dimensions, we must stylistically find a new way, no matter how much trust we may place in our sophisticated technology.  The arrogant tendency of 3-D animators to see their craft as a continuation of 2-D animation is responsible for the exaggerated, saccharine essence behind the fake appearance of CGI in general.

The difference between the two crafts of 2-D animation and 3-D special effects animation for live-action films should be like the difference between acting for stage and acting for screen: stage actors must speak loudly and in melodramatic fashion, but a film actor's performance relies on the visual language created by the cinematographer: a slight change of angle or a particularly profound cut can be the difference between representing joy and representing sorrow.  If 3-D animators designed subtle characters whose ears didn't wiggle and whose tails didn't twitch instead of the visual equivalent of a Peter Frampton track, current technologies might be able to produce realistic-looking supplemental effects for live-action films.  Otherwise, it's about showcasing all-too-impermanent technology. 

Like Clash of the Titans or The Ten Commandments, Avatar carries on the tradition of films about special effects at the expense of stories.  The truth is that less is more; Jurassic Park - from 1994 - still boasts some of the most realistic special effects to date, complemented by darkness, rain, and fundamental story structure.  The move away from a hybrid of special effects techniques to fit a situation to showcasing CGI rests on both economic and stylistic causes: the cost, workload, and knowledge capital required for animatronics, models, and CGI used in conjunction with film are prohibitive when compared to solely CGI and costumes used in conjunction with digital cinematography.  

Speilberg and Lucas represent the two poles of thought on this subject.  I have to side with Speilberg: no matter how many pixels, no matter how high the resolution, or even if one uses stereoscopic cameras, as in Avatar, no director will ever be capable of perfectly matching the lighting and textures of scenery with that of deus ex machina CGI; high-resolution digital will never be able to duplicate the photochemical process.  Furthermore, Directors who take the Lucas approach to CGI tend to neglect whether or not a particular effect is relevant at all: George Lucas may have been able to digitally create Jabba the Hutt for his triumphant remake of Star Wars: A New Hope, but he never asked himself whether or not that scene fit the rest of the film.  The truth is it looks ridiculous even when compared to the absurdities of the Star Wars universe.    

While Avatar's animation can boast a high frame-rate and high-resolution graphics, it can't deny the fact that it looks like the Treehouse of Horror episode of the Simpsons where Homer winds up in the real world - or like a blue version of Shrek.  It's better for directors and animators alike to have more humility when incorporating CGI effects into their films.  Technology is not great in and of itself because we can make it; technology is great because of of what it allows us to do.  People who like Avatar fundamentally misunderstand the nature of technology.   

I'm dismayed that Avatar will inevitably change movies forever.  The last time special effects movies were this big, in the 1950s, the beat poets were deeply exploring the meaning of llfe and American society, and the counterculture was practicing in the on-deck circle, but in the present, even a cursory glance at The Soup reveals we are getting dumber and dumber by the minute.  Box Office revenues hit record lows in the last few years, and Avatar - a vulgar, special effects bonanza - comes along and shatters records previously set by Titanic, - Cameron's last overrated and empty-headed box office smash.  It's clear that the immediate future of film will be all about stereoscoping and polarized sunglasses: its only been ten years, but we've come a long way from the blend of solid action, supplemental CGI, intelligent film-making, and commercial success that was Gladiator.

Ultimately Avatar is shockingly derivative and stupid in all regards, the filmic equivalent of a Dan Brown thriller. In creating Pandora, James Cameron ripped off Ferngully, Chris Dane Owens, magic mushroom posters, Monster Hunter, and Yes album covers; the prayer scenes were lifted directly from Baraka and cheapened.  The human's war-robots, one of which "died", Cameron actually stole from his own film, Aliens.  All in all, Avatar represents a talented director motivated by certain profit and the subconscious desire to mine human brains in the same way as the bad guys in the movie ravage the Earth, err umm the Pandora: Avatar is a soulless mammon-machine bent on destruction.  Cameron admirably succeeded with the film in making me hate humanity, but in a totally different fashion than intended.

By Christopher Carr

The Cove, a 2009 documentary directed by former National Geographic photographer Louis Psihoyos, boasts an enviable collection of awards and critical acclaim.  The film won audience awards at Sundance, Hot Docs, Silver Docs, Sydney, and Maui, Golden Space Needle in Seattle, Best Feature Documentary in Galway, Best Theatrical and Best in Festival at Blue Ocean, Truly Moving Picture at Heartland, Best Feature Film and Best Storytelling in Nantucket, Winner at Newport Beach, Jury Award in Traverse City, and was selected Best Documentary by the National Board of Review, L.A. Film Critics, and New York Film Critics Online.  The Cove has a 95% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an average score of 82 on Metacritic.  It has been shortlisted for a Best Documentary nomination for the 2010 Academy Awards.  In the words of Metacritic, that is "universal acclaim."

The film's subject is dolphin hunting in Japan: a group of American activists sneak into a private cove used by local fishermen to trap migrating dolphins and film the subsequent slaughter. Yes—that’s right—the Japanese hunt and murder/death/kill cute little baby genius dolphins like Darwin from Seaquest.  While South Park devoted an entire episode to ripping the documentary, Michelle Orange of Movie Line puts it best:

How much of this (The Cove) should we believe? As a piece of propaganda, The Cove is brilliant; as a story of ingenuity and triumph over what seems like senseless brutality, it is exceptionally well-told; but as a conscientious overview of a complex and deeply fraught, layered issue, it invokes the same phrase as even the most well-intentioned, impassioned activist docs: Buyer beware. 

Japanese consumption of whale and dolphin meat and Japan's general spurning of International Whaling Commission resolutions are extremely complex issues that should be examined soberly.  Unfortunately, the activists in The Cove—like many of the louder, more self-righteous environmentalists—skip the part where they take time to consider the multifaceted, layered issue and rush blindly in convinced the world is comprised of evil, greedy men for them to battle.  Even more unfortunately, this attitude turns off many naturally skeptical people (the support of which the environmental movement sorely needs) from real and important causes.

From the Japanese perspective, whales and dolphins are not particularly special.  There is a significant body of scientific evidence to support the Japanese position: while cetaceans do have large, complex brains, much of their neurons are devoted to the maintenance of large bodies and energy-intensive sonar lobes.  Much of dolphins’s charm is attributable to their “smile”—an accident of evolution—and the fact that they live in the ocean: limited encounters with human beings (who historically have killed most animals they came across) has made dolphins noticeably social and docile.   

In certain parts of Japan, dolphins are food, just as cows are food in America but not in India.  Imagine if a group of devout Hindus snuck into a Chicago Jurgis Rudkus-style slaughterhouse and pieced together a documentary about how Americans were a bunch of savages for murdering holy cows, complete with graphic shots of cows's heads being cut off, spliced Michael Moore style with out-of-context footage of slaughterhouse workers laughing, complete with a Samuel Barber soundtrack.  When the ensuing mob crowds the slaughterhouse and attempts to shut down business, the humble meatpackers would surely be perplexed.

Much of Western Civilization’s image of dolphins as superbeings originates in the work of John C. Lilly , a 1960s counterculture physician convinced that LSD was a magical drug capable of enhancing consciousness.  Lilly, who described himself as a psychonaut, used to drop acid and swim with dolphins then write “research papers” on the ensuing awesome spiritual journeys and the wisdom bequeathed by the noble cetaceans.  It should come as no shock that most of the rest of the world does not have the same mystical perspective of dolphins as westerners. 

Hayden whatever gets arrested by the evil Japanese.This is not to say that the comparison of dolphins with cows is fair.  Cows are bred specifically for consumption: they wouldn't even be alive if there were not human demand for their milk and their meat.  If cows went extinct, it might even be good for the environment.  Dolphins, on the other hand, are part of the natural ecosystem.  Hunting them at large scales interferes with the natural ecological order and inevitably brings about unanticipated consequences. 

Nor do the dubious origins of research into dolphin intelligence imply that dolphins are not intelligent.  There are plenty of comprehensive studies on the abilities of dolphins and whales to communicate and recognize patterns—enough for the world outside of Japan to conclude that for the time being, there should be a moratorium on killing them.  However, it is important to note here that the IWC only covers large cetaceans and the ban on whaling is for ecological—not humanitarian—reasons.  There are no arguments based in international law to indict the Japanese. 

Brendan O’Neill of Spiked goes so far as to describe the film as racist:

The Japanese are depicted as suppressed and unquestioning: we’re shown speeded-up footage of hordes of Japanese people walking through garishly-lit, buzzing city centres, their travels to work or home crudely reduced to pointless, super-fast marching through the streets, and we’re told that there’s a saying in Japan that ‘if a nail is sticking up, pound it down’ – in other words, Japanese culture is stultifyingly automaton. Where old racist America depicted the Japanese as rats, contemporary countercultural America depicts them as members of a rat race. The Taiji fishermen – sorry, the hook-wielding crazy killers of beautiful dolphins – come off the worst. The film dehumanises them to an alarming degree.

While I sympathize with O'Neill's premise, I disagree with him on several points.  The filmmakers interview many people in Tokyo, all of whom are unaware of the dolphin-slaughter.  Ric O’Barry, the activist hero of The Cove, remarks in response: "how can an activity be traditional if no one knows about it?"  As a counterpoint, consider that no one in America knew about helicopter wolf-hunting until Sarah Palin ran for Vice President.  Cajun food is undoubtedly an American tradition—one of the oldest—but ask people in Chicago if they know how to cook it or even what the ingredients are, and you'll get a lot of blank stares as well.  

Tokyo is a busy city where young people go to pursue successful careers and social climb.  Very few people in Tokyo would be aware of a small group of fishermen in a small village hundreds of kilometers away hunting an animal without any cultural mystique in Japan.  The contention that public ignorance and lack of outrage implies some government coverup doesn't make the filmmakers racists so much as it makes them morons cum manipulative assholes.  Furthermore, Japanese civilization is populous and diverse.  The idea that something traditional in one part of Japan must be traditional throughout the country betrays a lack of imagination on the part of the filmmakers. 

However, although it is unrelated to the central thrust of the documentary, I do think the filmmakers have a point in this regard: Japanese culture is undoubtedly suppressed and unquestioning, although this is a relatively recent development.  The Japanese school system is nationally standardized and largely based on that of the Second Reich (we know where that lack of instruction in critical thinking and skepticism led).  All students must wear the same clothes, eat the same lunch, and do the same work, regardless of individual ability or interest.  Many elementary schools even manage a logbook of what the child did outside of school time, including with whom the child played.  Schools assign students friends and often sever organic friendships if they think they are unproductive.  

Social engineering in Japan realized the goal of creating obedient, hard-working factory workers and paper-pushers to fuel the economy long ago.  To criticize this creativity-sapping ideal of uniformity is not racist, nor is it necessarily a product of chauvinistic American countercultural thinking; but it is a moral imperative for anyone who cares about the future of Japan.

Nevertheless, The Cove's analysis of the issue-at-hand—Japanese consumption of dolphin meat—misses the mark entirely.  The typical Japanese response to Western efforts to stop whale and dolphin killing relies on asserting whaling and cetacean consumption as an indispensable part of Japanese culture.  The Cove postulates that consumption of cetaceans is, in fact, not a part of Japanese culture, but rather the effect of recent government propaganda.  The truth is that the Japanese have been eating whale and dolphin meat for hundreds of years, and it is undoubtedly a part of their culture, but so what?  

Whaling was a huge part of American culture, too—as anyone who’s been to New Bedford or Nantucket or read the great masterpiece of American Literature, Moby Dick, knows.  Slavery was also a huge part of American culture for a very long time.  Decapitating Chinese prisoners with samurai swords and suicide-bombing was part of Japanese culture before and during World War II, but the Japanese don’t do that anymore, and Americans do not have slaves.

This is because societies change their practices as they become more civilized.  Whaling was originally banned in the United States because we hunted whales to near extinction.  In 1986, western countries convinced the IWC to ban the practice worldwide, in no small part due to a public zeitgeist which acknowledged that cetaceans may possess not insignificant intelligence.  The idea that something cannot be stopped because it is a part of one's culture is laughable (and perhaps the inevitable product of a school system that ignores the development of critical thinking skills).

The Japanese response to the IWC ban was to halt "commercial whaling", but begin publically financing the slaughter of whales for “scientific research” such as weighing and measuring the length and width of dead whales.  Since the whales are already dead for scientific reasons, their meat is sold to the highest bidder or donated to the school system, to prevent waste.  Whale is regularly available to eat in Japan despite international bans on commercial whaling.  I've eaten it.  It's not very good.  And before the ban whale was the cheapest "fish" available.

The more conservative elements of the older generation often lament the increased price of whale meat due to international bans and the limits of the Japanese government’s ability to defy them and still keep face.  Their solution has been to indoctrinate youth via mandatory whale school lunches.  In Japan, all students must eat the same thing for lunch.  This may sound ridiculous to Americans who have not experienced military training or fraternity hazing, but ordering people to do illogical, pointless things is a proven method of effective social engineering.  Thus, Japanese schoolchildren are forced to eat whale and then told it’s a part of their culture.  This way, the myth is perpetuated.  

More importantly, donating whale meat to the school system in exchange for subsidies allows fishermen to keep their jobs, and conveniently circumvents the “commercial” part of the IWC’s ban on commercial whaling.  The absurd waste of the Japanese government's subsidizing the killing of whales to feed children food they don't want to eat demonstrates the vacuousness of Japan's argument.  

Japan should stop whaling because the resources of the seas do not belong to it, the Japanese take more than their fair share of common marine resources, and almost every other nation considers the practice of whaling outmoded and barbaric.  Since the seas and their inhabitants are property common to every nation, Japan should respect international resolutions and cease defying them with pathetic excuses designed to allow for the exchange of subsidies for donations.

When the cultural and scientific research arguments fail, the Japanese delegation at the IWC often spuriously argues that whales and dolphins are depleting world fisheries.  This is the same argument used to justify the slaughter of large carnivores such as wolves, bears, and tigers that has led many of them to become endangered species, if not altogether extinct.  The real agent driving world fisheries to exhaustion is doubtlessly people, and the nation consuming the largest share of fish is Japan.  

global distribution of fish catchThis brings up a good point which the film briefly touched on but would have been better served as the focal point: the world’s fisheries are indeed being rapidly depleted, and the Japanese, and increasingly, their numerous and sushi-loving Chinese neighbors play no small role.  If the Japanese were honestly basing their consumption of whales and dolphins on a desire to save the world’s fisheries, they would stop eating sashimi twice a day. 

A final point of note is that whale and dolphin meat contain unsafe levels of mercury.  The Cove focuses on this to a large degree, and it is a public health issue that is largely ignored in Japan: a nation with a long history of ignoring public health issues.  Many elderly Japanese consume tuna sashimi everyday.  As with chronic smokers, the attitude towards hydrargyria (inorganic mercury poisoning from consuming too much large fish resulting in irreversible peripheral nerve and brain damage) is that, “I’ve been eating tuna everyday for years and I have no problems.  I love tuna.  It’s too late to cut down.”  

Ironically, mercury has a short half life of seven to ten days, and if there are no symptoms of disease, mercury levels can be dramatically reduced in a short time-span.  Furthermore, mercury levels increase via bioaccumulation: thirty years ago, mercury poisoning was not really an issue.  Now, it is starting to become one, and in the future—if there are still any tuna left—they will doubtlessly be far less fit for consumption than they are today.  So, the argument that one has been eating tuna for years with no problems falls apart: the tuna of thirty years ago was a different animal entirely. 

bioaccumulation of mercuryWhile hydrargyria is a serious problem that is likely to become a major public health concern in the future, the filmmakers disingenuously compare it to Minamata Disease, which results in severe birth defects, insanity, sudden blindness, deafness, paralysis, coma, rapid deterioration of the mental faculties, and painful slow death.  Hydrargyria is a result of chronic exposure to trace levels of mercury accumulated in the world’s oceans, whereas Minamata Disease results from sudden exposure to very high levels of mercury.  Minamata Disease originally occurred as a result of the Chisso Corporation dumping large amounts of toxic mercury into Minamata Bay over a period of sixty years dating from 1908, during which the company paid off local fishing lobbies and continued to dump even well after disease broke out.  The Japanese government did nothing to stop it, nor did it begin to compensate victims until 2001.  While Minamata Disease was, and continues to be, a terrible episode in Japanese history, it is not quite at the same level as the Japanese government allowing or promoting the consumption of whale and dolphin meat.  

Nevertheless, dolphin meat does contain five times the international standard for safe consumption.  It is grossly irresponsible and morally repugnant to both encourage its consumption and to force schoolchildren to eat it in the spirit of some strange, stubborn nationalism.  Nevertheless, eating large amounts of whale and dolphin has been characterized as quintessential Japanese culture, and to oppose their consumption is seen, of course, as yet another form of western cultural imperialism imposed on a nation that has already lost so much to provincial Americanization and is in the midst of a cultural reassertion.  Western activists assuredly face an uphill battle.

The problem is not that killing dolphins and whales is inherently immoral.  The makers of The Cove seem to take this as fact and jump right into a Joseph Campbell-esque good vs. evil narrative.  In the process, the filmmakers unfortunately repulse many thoughtful, potentially sympathetic viewers.  The real problem with Japanese consumption of whale and dolphin meat is that the Japanese are taking more than their fair share of a resource that belongs to everybody despite unanimous censure as well as humanitarian, ecological, and public health concerns.  Their reasons for doing so are poorly articulated and spurious.  The consumption of cetaceans deserves treatment as a serious issue, not as the sensationalistic propaganda for which the environmental movement is sadly notorious.