Flipper killed himself. Actually, it was a dolphin named Kathy—one of five bottlenoses who played Flipper—who killed herself, but the point is the same really. This is the takeaway that former porpoise trainer Ric O’Barry wants you to gain from documentary The Cove: Three years after the marine adventure TV show went off the air, Kathy despaired in captivity and intentionally stopped breathing in the hands of the man who imprisoned her. So long and thanks for all the fish, asshole. After nearly 40 years of protesting marine parks, O’Barry finally has found a means of restitution. In this scintillating new activist documentary, he has joined with director Louie Psihoyos and a squad of divers and cameramen, handsomely funded by Netscape founder Jim Clark, to infiltrate a closely guarded inlet in the fishing village of Taiji, Japan—a cove that serves as an abattoir for 23,000 bottlenoses a year. These are the dolphins the local fishermen have deemed not cute enough to sell to aquariums, so they hack them to ribbons with spears. Psihoyos’ team is tasked with obtaining incriminating footage of the slaughter. It’s a heist movie: Ocean’s 11 in the, you know, actual ocean. The awful force of the climactic violence will tend to obscure nagging questions (it’s worth asking how we would respond to an American special-ops unit invading a sovereign nation if cute critters weren’t at stake), but the movie shows the virtues of a porpoise-driven life. PG-13. AARON MESH