Review: The Eco-Thriller Sea of Shadows Casts a Wide Net in Its Messaging

Richard Ladkani’s documentary bristles with drama and a panicky sense of righteous anger.

Sea of Shadows
Photo: National Geographic

Numerous nonfiction films about the Anthropocene—the supposed new epoch we’re living in, named and notable for widespread human-made changes to the environment—center on easily quantifiable catastrophes like retreating glaciers and rising ocean levels. But Richard Ladkani’s Sea of Shadows, which bristles with drama and a panicky sense of righteous anger, uses the potential extinction of one little-known species of whale to symbolize a far larger and potentially globe-spanning problem.

The whale in question is the vaquita, a dolphin-like creature endemic to the Gulf of California. At the time of this film’s making, there were most likely less than 15 left alive. Not a target of hunting themselves, the vaquitas had the bad luck of swimming in the same waters as the heavily fished totoaba and dying in the nets meant to catch their more valuable neighbors. The vaquitas are ultimately collateral damage in an illegal fishing scheme driven by greed, economic insecurity, failing security apparatuses, interstate organized crime, and more.

The film’s primary narrative is delivered in bold, clear, tabloid terms by Carlos Loret de Mola, a Mexican journalist who seizes on the vaquita story as a sensational new wrinkle in his country’s long-running cartel saga. Commonly referred to as the “cocaine of the sea,” the totoaba are caught for their swim bladders, which are believed by many Chinese to have medicinal value. Literally more valuable than gold, each bladder can fetch up to $100,000 in China. The business continues to flourish despite what looks like an unprecedented deployment of Mexican naval assets to stop the now-illegal totoaba trade.

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De Mola’s accusatory accusations are delivered both on television excerpts included in the documentary and in long impassioned diatribes delivered to the filmmakers. He claims that not only is there a cartel boss behind the outlawed fishing scheme (“Who is the El Chapo of Totoaba?” is one of his more pungent headlines), but that the Mexican military is at best ineffectual and at worst fully aware of who’s running the operation.

Working alongside the navy are various members of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an international non-profit, marine wildlife conservation organization committed to saving the vaquita and whose members’ high-dudgeon remarks are braided into de Mola’s denunciatory screeds. They have their own destroyer-sized vessel, which they use to pull up nets threatening the vaquita, and also alert the navy to illegal fishing boats out hunting for totoaba at night. The latter is the more dangerous of their missions, as the fishing boats often bristle with heavy weaponry and their rock-throwing crews are brazen enough to face down the Mexican marines in a hard-to-believe riot that the cameras catch in broad daylight.

But the risk is worth it for the activists, because as Sea Shepherd crew member Jack Hutton, they’re “fighting for the planet.” That point is what explains much of the film’s apocalyptic action-flick tone. In between the crisply dramatic night-time maritime chases and episodes of dark cartel violence, much of it shot with a glistening aerial wide-angle cinematography that evokes some of the work of Matthew Heineman, are explanations as to why this one particular whale matters so much. Many of those arguments center on the vaquita as symbol of what needs to happen in order to arrest the rising levels of species extinction on the planet.

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Sea of Shadows can come close to feeling hyperbolic. But despite its good-versus-evil dynamic, there’s little pretense in the film that this is an easy problem to solve. Fortunately, Ladkani keeps an eye on the plight of the fishermen themselves, many of whom are essentially forced to keep up with the illegal fishing because they need to pay off corrupt officials or are massively in debt to the cartel bosses they have to buy equipment from. After all the impassioned statements from the mostly Anglo EAN activists, Ladkani leaves the final word to Javier, an old San Felipe fisherman who’s just trying to do the right thing. “They are killing my ocean,” he says. “With the death of a sea comes the death of a people.”

Score: 
 Director: Richard Ladkani  Distributor: National Geographic  Running Time: 104 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2019  Buy: Video

Chris Barsanti

Chris Barsanti has written for the Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and Online Film Critics Society.

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