The Cove is a documentary in the form of a heist thriller. As with all heist films, a team is assembled to do a big job. Each member of the team has a skill: the diver, the equipment expert, the muscle man, the go-to man, the driver. A plan is made with maps of the area (Taiji, Japan), and the mission is set into motion at night. The challenges: Taiji's law-enforcement agencies and aggressive fishermen. The prize: images of dolphins being slaughtered.

That is the structure and content of the whole movie, and the go-to man of the team is Richard O'Barry, a former trainer for three of the dolphins that played Flipper in the long-running TV series of the same name. O'Barry is passionate, insane, dedicated. His life has the heaviness and certainty of absolute meaning: Wherever a dolphin is in captivity, it is his job to set it free. Indeed, the man who played a role in popularizing the mammal, and as a result sending them by the thousands into the hell of water parks and aquariums, is now their Moses. O'Barry began as a trainer and ended as a savior. The transformation was caused by one of the Flippers committing suicide in his arms. He eventually came to the conclusion that the line between humans and dolphins is very thin. And now if you look into O'Barry's mad-Moses eyes, you can see that this is a man who places the intelligence of dolphins on a higher level than the intelligence of humans.

I love this documentary! But I do not think dolphins are that smart. Fishermen easily trick the poor things into their nets of captivity and death. If dolphins were really smart, they would avoid visiting Taiji in September. In fact, they would avoid Japan altogether. There are so many places on earth that have humans who do not care to turn their flesh into sushi. How can we humans communicate this important piece of information to them? Who is their leader?

The end of this documentary is brutal. One of the main reasons why the images captured by the team are so disturbing is because dolphins have blood that looks like human blood. When they are slaughtered, the sea turns red.

Because of this documentary, I have come to regret this line from the review I wrote for March of the Penguins: "The only animal worth making a documentary about is the human." That is the fourth most stupidest thing I have ever written. Sorry, penguins. Sorry, dolphins. Sorry to all other forms of life that happen to not be as smart and as deadly as humans.