Blackfish is a documentary directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite that covers the topic of SeaWorld and their orca whales, particularly the male orca named Tilikum. However, the film itself is really only a documentary in the way it is put together.
The film is an exposé and could be viewed as propaganda. Blackfish is very one-sided. If you wanted a film that actually showed two sides to an argument, you are out of luck. Mark Simmons is one of the former trainers interviewed by the filmmakers and was only actually seen twice in the movie, even though he was interviewed as much as the other trainers seen in the film. In a video on SeaWorld’s YouTube page, he states that he was told that the piece would be balanced and represent many sides of the issue. However, after seeing the film you can tell that was a flat out lie.
Centering its focus on those who strictly opposed SeaWorld keeping orcas, the film never shows an opposing view. The film was heavily edited and, from what I’ve gathered from reading about the film from different sources, the producers of the film only used clips that would further their agenda in the biased film. The producers also only used former employees, some of which hadn’t worked in SeaWorld for a long time. In SeaWorld’s response to the film “The Truth About Blackfish”, SeaWorld states that one of the clips used while a former employee was speaking about her experiences was actually filmed at least ten years after the employee had left SeaWorld and was actually a video of one of their current trainers when the site went up.
Blackfish is also very emotionally manipulative. They use horror stories of the orcas, particularly Tilikum, attacking their trainers. They failed to touch on the many, many times that Tilikum had behaved well (by that I mean not attacking those in the water with him). They mentioned each time Tilikum had attacked or killed his trainers and in one case a park visitor who had stayed behind after hours and got into the pool with him (which is a crazy thing to do and is quite honestly is a little dumb…).
The film had also stated that there has NEVER been an attack on a human by an orca whale in the wild. This is actually quite fishy (no pun intended), as there’s no plausible way the producers could ever prove that statement to absolute truth. Mainly because we can’t go back and watch the whales interact with humans from the beginning of either species creation. Also, the associate producer of Blackfish, Tim Zimmerman did an interview with Huffington Post in January of 2014 stating that SeaWorld, which claims to be a leader in conservation, research, and rescuing sea life, only spends 0.0006 percent on conservation and rescuing sea life. Zimmerman never really provided proof that these numbers he calculated were at all accurate, which makes it hard to accept his words as absolute truth.
Blackfish had a few scenes where it showed people protesting and telling SeaWorld to free their whales, which included the former trainers. While I don’t disagree with the sentiment behind this, logically it would do way more harm to the whales than good. I have three dogs at home, who obviously we provide food for. They know when its time to be fed and will run around the kitchen and pace till we feed them. This is similar in animals in captivity. A lot of captive animals associate humans as providers of food. The orcas in SeaWorld’s care would be no different. They would have a harder time caring for themselves and hunting, especially those that were born in captivity. That could lead to them dying to starvation…
SeaWorld has recently pledged to phase out the orca shows and slowly phase out the orcas they have in captivity, which in a way is the film getting what they kind of wanted – no more orca shows and no more orcas at SeaWorld.

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