10 Bullsh*t Documentaries That Aren't Worth Your Time

7. The Cove

There are controversial documentaries, and then there are controversial documentaries. The Cove is the latter. Which is meant to be worse, if that wasn't clear. Many filmmakers take to the non-fiction format in order to push an agenda, whether that's the Nazi propaganda of Leni Riefenstahl or the didactic works of Michael Moore. We're sorry for comparing those two. But it's a similar mind set, presenting certain €œfacts€ in favour of giving an argument for something you believe in, whether that's something purely evil or something mostly good. We can't argue that the makers of The Cove were trying to get across anything less than a mostly good point of view - that the commercial hunting of dolphins, especially in Japan, should be stopped - but the way they go about it doesn't really help their case. Now, obviously the Japanese audiences weren't so hot on being portrayed as murderous dolphin killers, but they had other reasons to be peeved as well. You can talk about their unfair representation, but worse is that director Louie Psihoyos straight up lied a bunch of times in The Cove: two interviewees said that producers lied to them about the content of the film before agreeing to be a part of it, the movie falsely claims that the head of the whaling division at Japan's Fisheries Agency was fired as a result of their investigations (he's still there), and a scene which shows a map of places dolphins caught by Japanese fishermen are sent turned out to have no basis in reality. Then you get into the allegations that they provoked hostile reactions of fishermen seen on screen by swearing and saying offensive things in Japanese, and you gotta question the whole thing.