This film reminded me of Spurloch’s Super Size Me in that it is entertaining, has an important agenda, but takes the wrong approach to make an entirely successful documentary. It will draw crowds, it will please them, and it will probably at least get many people to stop ordering tuna at sushi restaurants, which, like Spurloch’s film getting me to nix fast food from my diet, is laudable. But this is essentially a heist film with a forced pay-off. Richard O’Barry, the protagonist, former trainer of Flipper, dolphin rights activist, wants to make Japanese fisherman out to be satanic demons of the sea, but ignores the film’s most interesting argument, which he vocally dismisses in the film: Why is killing dolphins for food in Japan any worse than killing cows, chickens, turkeys, lamb, and deer for meat everywhere else? It is very upsetting and emotionally traumatic to see the massacre of the dolphins at the end of this film, but so would it be to witness any of the inhumane ways that the aforementioned animals are killed. Psihoyos also must think that Japanese citizens (and the viewers of his film) are not very intelligent, as he shows interviews with 4 or 5 pedestrians in Tokyo who claim that they didn’t know that dolphins were killed for food, expects us to believe that this is a common ignorance. Give me a break. And then to whip out his iPhone to show them, standing on the sidewalk, footage of dolphins being slaughtered, and expect it to be telling or a revelation that these people watch the video in horror, is just manipulative filmmaking. O’Barry’s narcissism comes full circle as he blasts triumphant victory music when he walks into an International Whaling Comission meeting with a TV strapped to his body showing the footage of the dolphin slaughter, as if he has accomplished something despite all of the apathetic faces in the room who, literally, have bigger fish to fry. I like what this film wanted to say on animal rights, captivity, training, and what not, but the film blatantly ignores every other animal that is eaten (the filmmaker actually does think it is more unjust to eat a dolphin than a cow because dolphins have larger brains), as well as zoos, circuses, and what the Japanese really think about this.