The Ivory Game

Maybe it's just me getting older and more melancholy or emotional but I think that after decades of watching 'Man's inhumanity to Man', for the last 20 years or so I've been waatching 'Man's Cruelty to Animals, in this particular case, The Elephant. This docu in which Actor-Conservationist Leonardo Di Caprio has a hand, along with many authorities from Africa, Hong Cong, USA, China including Andrea Crosta, Richard Leakey, Ian Stevenson and from the UK, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge. Elephants butchered in their hundreds by poachers who want the almost priceless tusks which are eventually sold onto the Chinese Illegal Markets and turned into various trinkets and items, many for tourists and the really pricey ones sold to collectors. It will be a 'Kleenex' job watching this for most. "The" Mr Big, a guy named Boniface Mariango aka Shetani is the prize that these braver - than - brave soldiers, animal protectors, conservationists all want to capture. I won't spoil it with the result. Personally, I would prefer that ALL the people in authority who take bribes leading down to the actual poachers who cause and oversee this destruction of ALL and ANY animals to gain a few hundred dollars but often much less, were introduced to one of the cartridges of the AK47's they use and THEIR carcasses left on the savannah.

This gets a passing grade because it's an important subject and has some compelling moments, but as a film, I thought this was quite weak, or at least lacking.

I got the sense that a great deal of footage was shot around a broad subject, without much in the way of structure or narrative planned ahead, and then the finished film came together in the editing. There are a few stories going on at once, and while the interviews and editing do their best to connect it all, but I didn't buy it. It felt less like a full feature film and more like watching a 6-part miniseries where you only catch 20 minutes of the first episode, 20 minutes of the second, and so on.

Hunting an endangered species like the elephant only for their ivory is terrible, and I admire the people in this film for devoting themselves to making it a thing of the past. It's important to expose the individuals and institutions who allow such a trade to happen, and if this film has changed the world at large for the better, then it deserves praise. But if you want a story, or something that progresses in a logical fashion, or just something that's compelling in a way that the best documentaries out there are, you may not find it with The Ivory Game.

Despite featuring competent visuals, music, and knowledgeable interviewees, it doesn't flow at all and is surprisingly unengaging. It's a noble film and overall not a terrible one; more just one that isn't very involving or exciting. If it sounds really up your alley, I could give it a hesitant recommendation, but otherwise I'd say go watch any of the other 5,000,000 documentaries currently on Netflix.

This is a must see documentary about the desperate battle to save the elephant from extinction, and at the same time save some remnants of the beautiful natural heritage of a planet for future generations. We say we love our children, but what kind of world are we leaving them. See the front line defenders of these majestic beasts in some of Africa's leading game parks, as well as dedicated investigators and campaigners around the world, bravely trying to stop the criminal and barbaric syndicates from plying their deadly trade.

Great documentary about a problem that is not talked, we live in a world that people care more about how they look and what they can buy than actually solving real problems that we created... Its difficult to understand the point that we reached when theirs humans being killed to protect elephants and other animals from being extinct.

First of all, this is a very well made documentary and you can notice that from the first shot. Directors Kief Davidson and Richard Ladkani have done a really great job in putting the pieces of ivory trade together in a very comprehensible narrative that exposes the whole circle of the game.

We get to know the whole infrastructure behind it, from local killers working for local dealers, to foreign dealers and (usually Chinese) wealthy buyers. The cinematography of it is breathtaking as we are taken to visit the natural habitat of Elephants in South East Africa and meet the people who try to protect them against all odds and overwhelmingly lack of resources. We get to know the enthusiastic wildlife conservationists working in Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and get to know their motivation for fighting poachers and the whole illegal network. We get to know the man behind Wildleaks - an organization that leak the information about that network and we go undercover with them to meetings with dealers in China.

The whole documentary feels like a first class thriller with chase footage of the poachers and undercover agents risking their lives to expose the wide network, except this one is a reality.

Although one small minus for me was that not enough (in my opinion) was said about how complex,intelligent and emotional animals Elephants are. I mean they can paint, they visit spots where their members were killed or died and mourn the dead bones together, which we could consider as a form of ritual. They are able to use tools (although on lower level than chimps). Together with dolphins and apes they exhibit forms of self-recognition and they have an excellent memory.

Although elephants also cause some problems to people, especially in Asia where urbanization and human population claimed a lot of their natural habitats, the massive genocide of elephants for their ivory is a sign of something much larger than just ivory black market. It's a sign of expansion of human destructive relationship to our natural environment. We don't respect the nature as is documented by the global warming, and we don't give a sh*t about animals as they're mostly seen only as a necessary decoration of ever-shrinking wild nature.

I think this is a symbol of our addiction to power. We want to prove ourselves that we are the Gods and rulers of this planet and due to that addiction we are about to see some nasty results of that urge. Like there will be no elephants on the planet in few decades to come and more and more wild life territories will be sacrificed, so we will only know about the diversity of life from the history books. What kind of psychological effect will that have on future generation we can only speculate.