Film Review: Fatal Watch

The Human Cost of the Global Overfishing Frenzy

(Click image to access the trailer for Fatal Watch)

When reviewing a documentary film it is important that you first sit with the impact of what you’ve learned and let it settle in before attempting to articulate your thoughts on the experience of watching the film. But when what you have learned is so dispiriting, the problem presented so intractable as to make you feel despondent and powerless to alter its fateful trajectory, reviewing the filmmakers’ craft in presenting the problem can seem rather beside the point. 

This was the state I found myself in after watching Mark Benjamin and Katie Carpenter’s Fatal Watch. The ninety-minute film is ostensibly about the mysterious deaths or disappearances of four fisheries observers, people whose job it is to join the crews of high seas fishing boats and record any illegal practices or activities, ranging from violations of fishing industry regulations to human rights abuses and drug smuggling. 

Pause and consider for a moment how antithetical this arrangement is: A single observer is placed on a boat to be the eyes and ears of the watchdogs monitoring the activities of all the other people on the boat. The livelihoods of the ship’s crew depend on loading up as big a catch as possible, the rules be damned. The observer’s job is to report the captain and crew when they cheat. He or she is alone in this role tens or perhaps hundreds of miles from shore. What could possibly go wrong?

Spoiler alert: Twenty-minutes into the film the despair begins to creep in. What you learn while following the fragmented and ineffectual investigations of the disappearances of the four featured observers is that, as Liz Mitchell, President of the Association of Professional Observers  says, there are “no consequences.” Observers die or disappear at sea and no one is held accountable. 

The filmmakers weave frustratingly thin threads of dead-end investigations into a narrative that the viewer hopes is going to miraculously come together into a coherent tapestry revealing hidden truths about the observers' fates. But the only truth that is revealed is just how powerful and secretive the world’s state-backed fishing industries and their commerce-driven management organizations are. In the final act of the film, the true villains are unmasked and the scale to which our oceans are being victimized is revealed. But justice for the human victims remains out of reach.  

Benjamin and Carpenter have created a film that reminds us once again of H. sapiens’ capacity for wreaking environmental havoc on a global scale. But beyond that they expose the wanton disregard the perpetrators of this eco-violence have for the lives of the people whose job it is to help assure that the industry operates within the rule of law. When the viewer learns that a shipping company’s lawyer was able to get a doctor to change one observer’s cause of death from blunt force trauma (the original cause supported by the evidence) to hypertension, it is impossible to keep cynicism from overwhelming every other emotion this powerful film evokes. 

The filmmakers devote the final moments of Fatal Watch to the voices of the advocates and activists working to address the cruelty and injustice the viewer has witnessed. Out of respect for the scale and complexity of the problem, they wisely eschew suggesting any simplistic solution. One can only hope that their message reaches a global audience and helps inspire a desperately needed worldwide, state-supported counterforce to the inhumanity they have documented.