Sea savagery’s sad return
Final film is a fitting farewell from predator’s champion
If sharks could cry, the ones seen trapped and drowning in a fisherman’s drift net in “Sharkwater Extinction” surely would do so.
These thresher sharks, known for their long scimitar-shaped tails used for hunting, have been caught in a mile-long underwater meshwork used to indiscriminately trap all prey. The final fate for these magnificent marine creatures, among the sea’s most intelligent inhabitants, is to be hauled aboard a trawler and chopped up while gasping their final breaths.
This horrific scene from the late Rob Stewart’s final movie, filmed clandestinely at night while evading gun-wielding men, looks as if it must be in a part of the world where lawlessness reigns, including places visited by Stewart’s crew of activist filmmakers. But it’s happening in Santa Monica Bay, Calif., just off the coast of Malibu.
Stewart’s third film is also his best, adding urgency to the planetary concerns of his earlier films, “Sharkwater” and “Revolution,” with scenes of marine genocide that should make us all weep tears of rage.
Tragically, this will be the Toronto filmmaker’s last movie, since he died last year while completing it, in a Florida Keys diving accident. There is footage of him as he prepares for what will be his final dive, but the film doesn’t dwell on these sad circumstances.
Stewart’s presence and message are vitally on screen, as he begins with the good news of a global ban on the barbaric practice of shark finning, a ban he’d fought for years to obtain.
It’s followed by the terrible news that poachers have found stealthy new methods to get what they want. They’re still killing millions of sharks, an apex predator essential to the ecosystem and to the ultimate fate of the Earth. Without sharks, Stewart tells us via narrative voice-over, there will ultimately be no humans. Our existence depends on the health of the seas that sharks — which were here 200 million years before the dinosaurs — must continue to rule.
Increasingly, this seems to be a faint hope. Stewart narrates grim statistics: nearly 150 million sharks are killed each year, a toll that has reduced the global population of this species by 90 per cent in the past three decades. Poachers, many of them in cahoots with organized crime, are able to operate with little fear of arrest, since governments and politicians fail to robustly enforce their laws against illegal fishing.
Once sought mainly for their fins, which are as valuable as rare metals or gems on the black market, sharks are now part of a billion-dollar annual industry that sees them ground up for use as pet food, livestock feed and cosmetics.
They’re also sold as food to humans, under such misleading names as rock salmon, flake and whitefish. They’re actually hazardous to consume. As apex predators, consuming other fish and swimming in polluted oceans, shark flesh contains lead, mercury and neurotoxins.
Stewart is undaunted. “Sharkwater Extinction” uses drone cameras, stealth photography and sheer bravado to expose these and other atrocities: a Miami fisherman/tour-boat operator who brags of catching 50,000 sharks and who calls conservation efforts “propaganda”; a Panama City parking lot where authorities have collected nearly 40,000 fins seized from the luggage of air travellers; and the freezer hold of a Japanese ship docked in Cabo Verde, Africa, where tens of thousands of shark carcasses are stacked.
Yet Stewart didn’t want to leave us feeling that the situation is hopeless. Far from it.
“My goal is to make people fall in love with sharks,” he says, recalling his own fascination with sharks since his first encounter with one at the age of nine. “We still have a bright future, if we want it,” Stewart adds, in words that make for a fitting epitaph. “But we’ve got to do something. Now.”