Universalizing the Biotic Community in The End of the Line

 

Darwin’s Nightmare focuses on one example of species manipulation and human oppression. The End of the Line argues more generally for an ethical approach to the ocean environment that embraces sustainability. The film exclaims, “Imagine a world without fish,” and declares that, based on the current rate of fishing, the world will see the end of most seafood by 2048. By juxtaposing images of protected pristine seas with spectacles of predation, The End of the Line successfully argues for organismic approaches to ecology that see the survival of human nature indelibly intertwined with that of the nonhuman nature of the seas.

Reviews laud the film’s expose of what Andrew Schenker calls “a new threat to the planet’s sustainability.” As an Official Selection at the Sundance Film Festival, Nathan Lee of The New York Times declares, The End of the Line “expos[es] the damages wrought to the sea by the usual suspects: industrialized food production, unchecked capitalism, and soaring consumer demand,” for example, and highlights the film’s focus on “an overfishing so severe that the world’s piscatorial stock may be completely depleted by 2048.” Roger Ebert also notes the film’s documentation of “what threatens to become an irreversible decline in aquatic populations within 40 years.”

Measures of how effectively the film conveys this horrific message vary, however. Although Roger Ebert asserts that the film “is constructed from interviews with many experts, a good deal of historical footage, and much incredible footage from under the sea, including breathtaking vistas of sea preserves, where the diversity of species can be seen to grow annually,” Nathan Lee states that the film’s propositions “are slathered in laughable scare music.” Andrew Schenker goes further, nearly condemning the film’s effectiveness, declaring, “the picture fails to build a rigorous enough argument to sustain [its] indignant tone.” According to Schenker, “If overfishing is to take its place among that growing catalogue of woes already assaulting the American conscience, … it will certainly take a far more cogent polemicist than [director] Rupert Murray to make it stick.”