Film of the Week: End of the Line

Environmental calamity documentaries have pretty much settled into a post-"Inconvenient Truth" pattern: some horrible human abuse of nature is going to wreck the planet if we don't change our ways soon; visual evidence and talking heads reinforce the premise; then a laundry list of what people can do to stave off disaster gets optimistically - and not a little hectoringly - proposed in the last 10 minutes.
"End of the Line" doesn't deviate from this formula. But maybe because its subject, the industrialized overfishing of our oceans that could lead to the end of seafood as we know it just a few decades from now, lends itself to marvelous underwater photography and fascinating sociological complexity. Whether it's making fun of a pretentious London sushi restaurateur, pointing out the starvation potentiel for traditional African and Asian fishing communities or plunging us in among thinning but still beautiful schools of tuna and cod, Rupert Murray's film is as engaging as it is alarming.
And unlike most docs of this ilk (and our future fish-eating options), it always seems fresh.