All right, let's get this out of the way right up front -- we really dislike much of this movie, a documentary on the plight of sharks. The truth is, it's hard to know whether Sharkwater is supposed to be about sharks, or about the film maker, Rob Stewart, and his "personal journey" to understand them. We actually lost track of the number of times Stewart uses the word "I" in the first ten minutes of the movie and it's no coincidence that his image is superimposed over everything else on the movie's posters and DVD cover.

Unfortunately, this has become a fashionable trend lately among underwater photographers: get up in front of an audiance and begin blathering about your personal quest to figure out how you can help save the oceans. The problem is that we're all pretty much trying to figure out the same thing -- without the public angst, of course -- and listening to a bunch of a-holes whining about it doesn't really help.

But back to Sharkwater. Stewart spends much of the first half of the movie telling us things we already know; ie., that sharks are being overfished; and things we know are blatantly untrue; ie, that no one is talking about the problem. Mixed in along the way is a relatively small amount of very pretty, but fairly generic, underwater footage.

But with all of these negatives, there is one point at which Sharkwater succeeds brilliantly -- capturing the structural scope and depth of the business of shark fishing. We had always assumed that the problem, while worldwide and monumental, was basically the work of countless, unconnected fishing fleets. Sharkwater makes it clear, more so than anything else we've ever seen, that shark fins are at the base of an illegal, billion-dollar industry, with the backing of organized crime and a cadre of corrupt government officials from one end of the world to the other. But, even here, Stewart can't help but jump in front of the camera and start waving his arms, using footage of a school of sharks hunting down a parrotfish as a metaphor for his own flight from the powers that he's pissing off with his film making. Again, who is Sharkwater supposed to be about.

In the final anlaysis, this documentary has to be seen as a huge missed opportunity to publicize the evils of the sharkfin industry rather than the potential star power of the film maker. We won't go so far as to say "skip it," because of the degree to which it succeeds at the point discussed above. But, unlike a documentary such as Blue Water, White Death, Sharkwater need only be seen once -- with no reason to watch it again.