Eco-Terrorist: Battle for Our Planet

Thanks to Animal Planet’s Whale Wars reality TV series, many are aware of the eco-vigilantism of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Based in Washington state’s San Juan Islands, but actively defending marine ecosystems and endangered marine wildlife across the globe, the Sea Shepherd organization has grown from its 1977 founding as a scrappy, impoverished band of save-the-whales pirates into a huge, well-oiled, and wealthy non-profit organization with multiple international missions and a fleet of vessels. Filmmaker Peter Jay Brown’s exciting if also somewhat self-congratulatory documentary Eco-Terrorist: Battle for Our Planet is loaded with historical footage of Sea Shepherd advocacy over the years. The film’s snarky, prankster-ish tone underscores the group’s non-lethal but aggressive stunts and tactics to block illegal whale hunting, disrupt the annual slaughter of Canadian harp seals by pelt hunters, attack “bottom trawling” fishing vessels (which kill everything in the path of nets that scrape the ocean floor), and more. An emphasis on Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson gives Eco-Terrorist a narrative through-line, as (over the course of decades) Watson moves from Santa Claus-like folk hero to international fugitive in hiding after an ally betrays him. Watson and his crew understand the entertainment value of what they do on behalf of marine animals, and they strategically play to omnipresent cameras because public support has demonstrably helped their larger cause. And there are certainly tense moments recorded here, as Watson often rams his ship into the sides of whalers, and especially when a Japanese whaler destroys a state-of-the-art, small Conservation Society ship with its crew aboard. Viewers should be warned that there is graphic footage of brutal killing by seal hunters, and of whales being harpooned. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (T. Keogh)