The Cove: more action thriller than documentary

In the 1960s, Ric O'Barry was arguably the highest paid animal trainer in the world after he caught and trained five dolphins to play Flipper in the iconic children's TV series of the same name.

But in 1970, when one of his prized dolphins became depressed and died in his arms, O'Barry underwent a Damascene conversion. He has spent the past four decades dedicated to freeing captive marine mammals from the industry he helped spawn.
 
A new American documentary The Cove, which opens in Britain on October 23, tells the story of how O'Barry, now 69, became a marine activist. More chillingly, however, it also exposes the brutal annual dolphin slaughter in the Japanese fishing village of Taiji.
 
Around 23,000 dolphins a year are slaughtered in Japan during the cull, which traditionally starts on September 1 and finishes at the end of April. Taiji purports to be a national park, which is sealed off with barbed wire to keep the annual bloodbath a secret.

Fishermen herd migrating dolphins into a small, hidden cove. Although a few dolphins are sold for as much as $150,000 each to aquariums and dolphin shows, most are speared to death, and sold off as dolphin meat, which the film claims is tainted with mercury.
 
In 2007, O'Barry and the film's director, the former National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos, put together a covert expedition to film the slaughter, by pretending they were there to document the degradation of local reefs. Once in, the filmmakers planted their underwater microphones and hid high-definition cameras in fake rocks. O'Barry, who had been arrested many times for trying to free captive dolphins, was forced at one stage to don a long black wig and a dress. "What's happening in Taiji is a horror show," he said earlier this year. "I won't sleep until it is stopped."
 
The Cove has won rave reviews since it took the audience award at the Sundance festival in January. In contrast with many worthy environmental films - such as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and Franny Armstrong's The Age of Stupid - Psihoyos and O'Barry get their message across with a narrative that is as adrenaline-packed as any Hollywood action film.
 
Despite attempts by the dolphin hunters to ban the film in Japan, The Cove was shown this week at the Tokyo international film festival. Taiji fishermen claim the "defamatory" film failed to present scientific evidence that dolphin meat contained dangerously high levels of mercury and that it was an "insult" to the town's 400-year dolphin hunting history. There are no plans to put it on general release in Japan.
 
WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING: Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times: "There are many documentaries angry about the human destruction of the planetary peace. This is one of the very best - a certain Oscar nominee." (Verdict: four stars out of four)
 
Trevor Johnston, Time Out: "There's an effective thriller element to this vividly assembled doc... however, what lifts the film beyond effective consciousness-raising into the realms of human tragedy, is the startling irony that project instigator O'Barry is none other than the trainer of '60s TV icon Flipper, whose popularity spawned the whole dolphin show explosion in the first place." (Verdict: five stars out of five)
 
Jeanette Catsoulis, the New York Times: "[The Cove] is a Trojan horse: an exceptionally well-made documentary that unfolds like a spy thriller, complete with bugged hotel rooms, clandestine derring-do and mysterious men in gray flannel suits." ·