This documentary’s core story is the one of the notorious
Killer Whale Tilikum, one of SeaWorld’s biggest attractions and is also
responsible for the deaths of three individuals that includes one of their own highly
regarded top Killer Whale trainers. The documentary not only reports and
investigates the three deaths that Tilikum has been responsible for over the
years, but also takes a look at the possible reasons for why these tragic events
have occurred; ultimately looking at the way in which these beautiful creatures
are treated once the SeaWorld parks are closed and out of sight of their paying
customers. We are brought to question not only the standards in which these
Whales are housed, but it also makes you the viewer question captivity in
general, this is just a relentlessly emotional trip that beats hard on your
heart and had me in tears on a good number of occasions, honestly even though
it’s been a fair few years since I’ve visited SeaWorld; by the end of this
film, I’d never felt so guilty about anything in my life as I did about my one
visit to SeaWorld all those years ago.
There are many comparisons to be made to the likes of The Cove (2009)
and Sharkwater (2006), but what I feel separates Cowperthwaite’s documentary
from those is that, you don’t get that sense that the filmmakers behind the
documentary here didn’t already have a hidden agenda when going into the making
of the film; Blackfish feels more natural in its revelations and with its
personal interviews with many people that these three deaths have affected, a
particular harrowing moment comes when an original Whale Hunter retells his
story and experience from when hunting these beautiful creatures first boomed
for these companies like SeaWorld. On the surface the film is anti-SeaWorld and
the negativity of captivity in general, but the documentary has so much more to
offer and is guaranteed to hit you extremely hard emotionally – I don’t think
it’s a case that Blackfish is necessarily a better ‘Doc’ than the likes of The
Cove and Sharkwater, it just offers something different in it’s approach to
tackling the issue of captivity. A must see documentary that is a real eye
opener and very harrowing and one to watch with a good supply of tissues to
wipe away the tears that will inevitably flow.
No. 2 Worst - Les Miserables dir Tom Hooper
I believe that I actually started the year off by going to
the cinema to watch Les Mis; having been dragged along with a group of friends
quite unwillingly, I’m not a person that is totally dead against the idea of
musicals but in general they aren’t my ‘cup of tea’ though given the fact this
was directed by Tom Hooper who directed The King’s Speech (2010) a film that a
really did enjoy quite a lot, I was heading into the film quite open minded and
rather interested in the over arcing story of the Les Miserables play. If
you’re going to make a musical surely one of the first things you’d make sure
of is that your cast are able to sing, which you can’t say for the actors here,
with Russell Crowe being the main culprit – he just sounds absolutely terrible,
not only that but the sound of the voice recordings don’t gel with the visuals
on screen, making it feel all too disconnected. It’s not only the singing that
is unbearable, but the films editing is outright horrendous, I’d imagine that
the Les Miserable play is actually very interesting and has a solid story to
tell, but Tom Hooper’s film doesn’t do enough to connect the dots – it jumps
between characters throughout various periods of time which leaves us the
audience struggling to grasp a sense of any of the characters journeys and turmoil’s
– instead it’s like viewing little snapshots and highlights of a story rather
than getting the whole picture, and to cap all of this off there is some rather
terrible camerawork that looks very amateur. Not to mention the fact that this
film is over 2 and a half hours long, which you’d think would be long enough to
put together some cohesive storytelling, but with Les Miserables flittering and
jumping around through time and bouncing around characters it’s an even greater
failure that it fails to deliver even a mildly adequate screenplay. It sounds
horrible and looks terrible and drags on for what seems like an eternity hence
why Les Mis is my second worst film of 2013.
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