The Cove Review

After watching The Cove, it made me very mad and angry towards Japan. Even though I knew it wasn’t Japan as a whole but certain people, I always found myself upset with the whole country. The style of the movie was very affected as showing how awful dolphin slaughter, especially in Japan.

A lot of the movie played on the audience’s emotions. They showed how dolphins were self-aware and were conscious with their surroundings. They had emotions too. They showed how dolphins are sensitive to sound, can have stress, and are aware of what is happening to them. They portray them as being able to feel like we do. Since we feel connected to the dolphins, it seems more wrong to kill the dolphins and we feel horrible and sad about the whole ordeal.

The word choices they used helped the movie. O’Barry used the word suicide when he described how Kathy the dolphin died. I do not know if dolphins are capable of committing suicide but the way he described Kathy’s death seemed like it was suicide. Using the word suicide helps the audience relate better with the dolphins.

The way the filmmakers portrayed the Japanese government and the people associated with the slaughters as malicious and having no remorse. In the film, the Japanese government was corrupt who recruited “bankrupt nations” to help them legalize whaling. They portrayed the fishermen as apathetic; in one of the hidden cameras, they were happy and laughing throughout the whole killing process.

The filmmakers left out a lot of statistics. Most of the statistics were about dolphin killings. The filmmakers did not include how many dolphins there were in the world, so we weren’t able to compare how many dolphins were killed to how many there were in the world. Without being able to compare, 23,000 dolphins a year is a really large number and one could assume that the dolphin population is depleting rapidly.

During the spy-ops scenes, the film felt like an action/suspense movie, with way it was in night vision mode and the music playing in the background. During those scenes, I felt nervous and anticipated what would happen next. It also made the activists seem like the good guys. They were doing this to save the dolphins no matter what laws were broken.

 Since most of Japanese did not know about the slaughters nor did they eat dolphin, I think they were first mad and upset that this was happening in their country. Then I thought afterwards that maybe they didn’t want to show the world that this was happening in their country, maybe feeling ashamed that it is happening there. I wouldn’t want the whole world knowing that there was something bad going on where I lived. It’s like the dirty secret I wouldn’t want anyone to know. It also portrays a bad image towards the Japanese people even though the filmmakers were targeting only the government and the fishermen/fisheries. If there was a movie that made me seem like a bad person, I wouldn’t want to shown worldwide.