The Cove

“The Cove’’ is a thriller in a classical sense. It’s the first of these movies to tell a story with more than stock footage and on-camera interviews. It also smartly refracts a major ethical, ecological problem through the prism of guerrilla events. The film follows the descent of members of the Colorado-based Oceanic Preservation Society on the small Japanese town of Taiji in order to install cameras to capture footage of local fishermen trapping and slaughtering dolphins. It opens with images recorded with a thermal night-vision camera of silhouettes swinging axes into slumping black mounds and gets a lot more graphic later on.

As it builds to that mission, the movie exposes possible conspiracies, coverups, and fabrications in parts of the Japanese government. Japan controls a great deal of the world’s fish market, a lucrative portion of which is invested in dolphins both as objects of public amusement and as food (the flesh, illegally high in mercury, is sold to an unsuspecting public as whale meat).

The facts of dolphins appearing at aquatic parks is generically upsetting (they’re cut off from what makes them dolphins; and we mistake their stress for bliss). But it has a personal corollary, too. Smartly, the film lays these sad biological insights at the feet of Ric O’Barry, a former dolphin trainer who caught and tamed the five dolphins who played Flipper on TV. He’s spent many of the last 40 years remorsefully fighting on behalf of dolphins. Operation Taiji is his idea.

His plan is to present the footage during an international whaling conference. If he can show the world the fishermen’s torture and killing, maybe the cove will be closed.