Review of Blackfish (2013) by Genericassignmentreview12345 — 27 Oct 2014

Blackfish is a very well made documentary about a very sad subject matter. It attempts, and succeeds at exposing the haunting reality behind the scenes of seaworld and it's killer whale shows. It brings in multiple people with backgrounds at sea world to talk about their experiences and ties it together with great visuals and shocking facts and statistics.

The film starts off with a bang, leading with the 911 call for the woman that was being eaten by one of the whales. This leads right into the introductions of all the main interviewees. They all talk about who they are, how they got to be a seaworld trainer, and how they each personally knew the victim of the previous clip. This section did a great job of hooking me into the film, and was really useful as it established the credibility of the speakers for the rest of the documentary.

This film also did a great job with showing visuals relevant to what the speakers were currently talking about, without being so much to actually distract from the points they are trying to make. Generally a lot of it was filler footage of the area or animal in particular they were talking about, and then only cutting to something more attention grabbing when the audio was in the clip itself. Such as the moments they showed bits of the performances or courts hearings. The part I found this footage to be especially impactful was during the SeaLand section. A lot of the footage was just slow shots of the empty facility, which appeared to me as far too small to be considered much more than a large dock. This combined with the few shots of the dark box they kept the whales in really gave a sense of how lousy the conditions were for these animals.

A lot of what stuck with me after watching the film, were all of the facts being used to prove that the animals were not healthy the current way they were being kept, and the general information about killer whales in general. Learning that killer whales were very emotional creatures due to the part of their brain being significantly bigger was very interested, and since it was explained near the beginning, it really added more meaning to instance where they explained that noise nobody had heard before when they took one of the whale's child away. Another, almost funny, instance of their wonderful use of statistics, was during the video clip of the park guides answering questions. Whenever she gave a statistic of the animals, such as the 25% occurrence of the floppy dorsal fin, the video would just cut back to one of the speakers flat out stating that was wrong, and why, in this case the chance actually being only 1%.

Overall, I found Blackfish to be a fairly interesting film, although very unsettling as well. It really makes you think about how animals in captivity are really treated, as well as being a pretty cool learning experience about killer whales. If you are one for good documentaries, I would definitely give this a watch.