Movie Review - Blackfish

Blackfish ***½ (PG-13) If you want a reason never to take the family to Sea World, or any similar tourist attraction, this documentary should do the trick. Told mostly by former trainers from many of its parks, we get a number of insiders’ views of how their showcase Orcas are acquired and treated, and many sordid details about incidents in which handlers have been killed and maimed, including key differences between the public explanations, and the facts that later emerged. It ain’t pretty.

This isn’t a polemic against those who capture killer whales and build entertainments venues around them. Much of that industry evolved here and abroad decades ago, when relatively little was known about these animals and how they function individually and collectively in their natural environs. For example, the bond between parents and offspring is far stronger and more enduring than anyone imagined when they started separating families for commercial purposes. The long-term emotional effects of captivity are still not fully understood, but may have been a larger factor in the tragedies that occurred than the PR and legal departments wanted anyone to know.

The film provides interview clips and footage for a credible look behind the corporate facade. We hear from trainers who truly loved and felt connections with the animals they handled. They were largely kept from knowing the truth about what happened to their peers in other venues, minimizing the role working and living conditions might have played in some whales turning on the humans and each other. That also meant keeping those employees in harm’s way from fully understanding the risks they were actually facing.

The content seems admirably limited to direct knowledge of those interviewed, with little that could be dismissed as speculation or hearsay. The PG-13 rating may seem deceptively mild for animal lovers. They minimize the gore of the incidents that were caught on tape, but some of what happens to the whales and their handlers will be hard for many to watch. When it comes to "family values", we could learn a lot more from the Orcas’ natural behavior in the oceans than from the tricks they can be taught to perform in theme parks. (8/2/13)