-By Frank Lovece

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Not all advocacy documentaries have to be Michael Moore trips through real-life absurdity, making points by making fun. Some can be humorless, one-sided diatribes that take a critical issue and beat you over the head with it—in this case, with a dead fish.

Screened in the Sundance Film Festival's International Documentary Feature Films section, and having opened to glowing reviews in England—where even a rave says it "feels like a political broadcast"—The End of the Line looks at the deep-sea overfishing that has depleted some fish stocks to near-extinction. British newspapers report the documentary has already prompted the chains Marks & Spencer and Pret à Manger to change their policies on what fish they sell, and that the Nobu restaurant in London has added a perplexing menu footnote to its signature dish: "Bluefin tuna is an environmentally threatened species. Please ask your server for an alternative."

So as a polemic it appears to work. As documentary? Not so much. The narration by actor and oceans activist Ted Danson is the most calm and evenhanded thing in a black-hat/white-hat melodrama that early on serves up a montage of fish guts, carnage, blood in the water, a woman calmly eating sushi, and chum being thrown to sharks. A segment depicting the capture and slaughter of tuna in the Straits of Gibraltar, where the traditional almadraba method of squared-off netting traps the fish and lets fisherman wade in to knife them, is filmed and scored in a way that evokes bullfighting—making the process seem not like provincial fishermen plying their trade as they have for generations, but instead some macho, Hemingwayesque spectacle.

Most of the globetrotting documentary, based on a book by Charles Clover, former environment editor of The Daily Telegraph, is not so overwrought, and leans heavily on talking heads from academia, plus impoverished local fishermen besieged by Big Aquaculture. Only one person from the latter is represented, though the narration occasionally notes its pro forma support of sustainability. The worst culprits are the Communist Chinese, whose over-reporting of catches made the world think fish stocks were fine for decades; the European Union, which sets fishing quotas twice as high as that needed for sustainability, and whose member nations largely don't enforce even that; and fishing fleets that work in protected waters, ignore international treaties and lie about their catches.

The documentary comes out against fish farming as currently practiced, arguing it takes five kilos of feed-anchovies to get one kilo of salmon, and that the anchovies could better be used to feed humans. Also, more marine reserves are needed to let stocks bounce back. The film applauds the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) label that assures fish come from a sustainable source. Wal-Mart, we're told, says that by 2011 it will sell only MSC-certified fish.

This is all great and tremendous and important, and global corporations and governments need to see this side of the story. The rest of us need to see both sides.