Delayed Reaction: Trophy

Premise: A documentary about the realities of big game hunting.

 

I need to start this off by admitting something. I have no idea what the answer to this problem is. And neither does Trophy. That's what's nice and frustrating about this documentary. It brings up numerous problems. It attempts to point out inconsistencies all around. It makes passive judgments about several people (or makes it clear to the audience what their opinion is). It shows the solutions some people have come up with, then doesn't pretend to know what's right. I like when documentaries take a more passive look like this, but I'll admit that the lack of a real arc to the story was very unsatisfying. I generally avoid the documentaries of this ilk that say "here's why we're all screwed" then end. They aren't good for my mental health.

I realize that I have inconsistent views on this topic. I'm in the category of people who like meat but don't like to think about where it comes from. I don't hunt. It's not at all appealing to me. I don't like guns and I don't like killing things. That's on me. At the same time, there's also a hunting culture that concerns me. Some people are just a little too into it. Like, you can show me all the venison and talk survival skills all you want, but I'm pretty sure you just wanted to shoot something at some point.

 

Trophy isn't about deer though. It's about big game: the stuff most of us have only seen in zoos. I personally like the idea of a world with rhinos and lions. They seem like cool animals. I don't have a solution for how to keep them around though. It's easy for me to say that I want there to be more lions when they aren't killing my livestock. As the human population grows and expands, there isn't the same ecosystem for all these animals. At some point, we do have to create an excuse to keeps them around that's more than "it would be nice". That's where this stuff about harvesting and selling the rhino horns or paying to hunt big game comes from. If there's a legal market to harvest or kill, there will be people making sure they stay around. Otherwise, poachers will kill them all. That seems pretty logical to me. While Trophy does explain all this in some way, it then also asks why people would spend so much to hunt big game. It seems weird that people would pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for a chance to kill something. I can kind of understand the thrill of really tracking it for a week or two, but then you move into this boutique industry where people have a group of guides in a structured environment that allows them to kill in a day or two. Increasingly, the experience is the kill not the hunt. And it just seems odd to me that the argument is that this animal won't go extinct because there are some many people who want to kill one.

 

I think Trophy does a fine job arguing the complexity of this topic while not painting the hunters in a very favorable light. Overall, I think it's an effective movie, but I suspect that whether or not someone watches it will come down more to whether or not you can stomach dead animals, animals in pain, or animals getting shot. Like there's a scene with a rhino calf crying because its parent was shot and it nearly broke me.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend