The Ivory Game (2016) User Reviews

When the Chinese start caring, Elephants and other animals will have a chance to survive.

[gonzofaratro · 9/10 · 8 February 2017]

Every once in a while a documentary comes along that can make a difference, Hello Orcas, thanks Blackfish.

The extermination of elephants, in such cruel way has only one people responsible, the Chinese. In China Ivory is a status luxury item, rich people loves it, and the president himself did not commit to an end of barbarities, like a good criminal politician, he said that someday in the future China will end its Ivory trade, meanwhile China continues to execute Elephants, 1 every 15 minutes

It is their crazy thirst for Ivory that has made this holocaust possible, the Chinese will deprive future generations of the beauty of this majestic and intelligent animal.

Yes, the killers are gangs of ignorant people led by unscrupulous monsters executing orders from the Chinese elite behind this lucrative trade.

The cruelty of the Chinese is difficult to measure, Rhino, Tigers, Bears, Elephants, anything that can be sold for exorbitant prizes will be killed for profit, they just don't care.

Ask yourselves why the Chinese government doesn't stop the trade, don't do anything to smugglers and let this happen?

It's their business too! The more animals they assassinate, the higher the profit is, and don't let people lie to you, in China Ivory sells everywhere, they know what they are doing, but money taste better

Government officials are involved, its widely known, in Hong Kong they bought some time, they want to kill and trade with animals until around 2022, so they will have time to prepare alternative channels

The Chinese became rich and began destroying the world, they could have chosen the opposite, but as with coal emissions, they just don't care.

Very Good Documentary

[thmurphy-37414 · 9/10 · 11 December 2016]

Personally, I am thankful for the release of this movie, as it will open the eyes of everyone around the world to put an end to the terrible murder of Elephants. I did a school project after watching this film and found a lot more interesting information about this problem. One of my favorite parts was all of the undercover work. Everyone that was involved with finding who was in charge were amazing. Everything in the move matches up perfectly with all of my research, and there truly is no better movie that addresses this problem. Another reason to watch the film is mainly to put in perspective for people the amount of Ivory husks that are being traded illegally. The amount is so alarming, and just to picture how many elephants are being killed is outstanding. If the same pace of killing is kept, there will no longer be any North African Elephants, and the population will never have a chance again. As the movie addresses the problem many times as it now or never, it truly is. If nothing is fixed, then that will be the end for Elephants in Africa. Lastly, one scene everyone needs to see is when they burn all of the Ivory. Hopefully the ban on ivory trade works this time. Watch the movie!

The desperate and deadly war to save the elephant

[mutingati · 9/10 · 6 June 2020]

This is a must see documentary about the desperate battle to save the elephant from extinction, and at the same time save some remnants of the beautiful natural heritage of a planet for future generations. We say we love our children, but what kind of world are we leaving them. See the front line defenders of these majestic beasts in some of Africa's leading game parks, as well as dedicated investigators and campaigners around the world, bravely trying to stop the criminal and barbaric syndicates from plying their deadly trade.

Elephants as commodity

[PeterPan158 · 8 November 2016]

First of all, this is a very well made documentary and you can notice that from the first shot. Directors Kief Davidson and Richard Ladkani have done a really great job in putting the pieces of ivory trade together in a very comprehensible narrative that exposes the whole circle of the game.

We get to know the whole infrastructure behind it, from local killers working for local dealers, to foreign dealers and (usually Chinese) wealthy buyers. The cinematography of it is breathtaking as we are taken to visit the natural habitat of Elephants in South East Africa and meet the people who try to protect them against all odds and overwhelmingly lack of resources. We get to know the enthusiastic wildlife conservationists working in Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and get to know their motivation for fighting poachers and the whole illegal network. We get to know the man behind Wildleaks - an organization that leak the information about that network and we go undercover with them to meetings with dealers in China.

The whole documentary feels like a first class thriller with chase footage of the poachers and undercover agents risking their lives to expose the wide network, except this one is a reality.

Although one small minus for me was that not enough (in my opinion) was said about how complex,intelligent and emotional animals Elephants are. I mean they can paint, they visit spots where their members were killed or died and mourn the dead bones together, which we could consider as a form of ritual. They are able to use tools (although on lower level than chimps). Together with dolphins and apes they exhibit forms of self-recognition and they have an excellent memory.

Although elephants also cause some problems to people, especially in Asia where urbanization and human population claimed a lot of their natural habitats, the massive genocide of elephants for their ivory is a sign of something much larger than just ivory black market. It's a sign of expansion of human destructive relationship to our natural environment. We don't respect the nature as is documented by the global warming, and we don't give a sh*t about animals as they're mostly seen only as a necessary decoration of ever-shrinking wild nature.

I think this is a symbol of our addiction to power. We want to prove ourselves that we are the Gods and rulers of this planet and due to that addiction we are about to see some nasty results of that urge. Like there will be no elephants on the planet in few decades to come and more and more wild life territories will be sacrificed, so we will only know about the diversity of life from the history books. What kind of psychological effect will that have on future generation we can only speculate.

Very good

[mfellipecampos · 8/10 · 17 March 2021]

Very good about an unspoken problem, we live in a world where people care more about how they look and what they can buy than actually solving real problems we create.

Documentary film seen on the 10th to the 11th of March 2021.

So very sad

[patherwill · 8/10 · 22 January 2022]

Maybe it's just me getting older and more melancholy or emotional but I think that after decades of watching 'Man's inhumanity to Man', for the last 20 years or so I've been waatching 'Man's Cruelty to Animals, in this particular case, The Elephant. This docu in which Actor-Conservationist Leonardo Di Caprio has a hand, along with many authorities from Africa, Hong Cong, USA, China including Andrea Crosta, Richard Leakey, Ian Stevenson and from the UK, Prince William, Duke of Cambridge. Elephants butchered in their hundreds by poachers who want the almost priceless tusks which are eventually sold onto the Chinese Illegal Markets and turned into various trinkets and items, many for tourists and the really pricey ones sold to collectors. It will be a 'Kleenex' job watching this for most. "The" Mr Big, a guy named Boniface Mariango aka Shetani is the prize that these braver - than - brave soldiers, animal protectors, conservationists all want to capture. I won't spoil it with the result. Personally, I would prefer that ALL the people in authority who take bribes leading down to the actual poachers who cause and oversee this destruction of ALL and ANY animals to gain a few hundred dollars but often much less, were introduced to one of the cartridges of the AK47's they use and THEIR carcasses left on the savannah.

Informative, enlightening, and encouraging

[dylanshelnutt · 9/10 · 3 May 2022]

The Ivory Game is a documentary about the ivory trade in Africa and China. The filmmakers followed multiple task forces that aimed to arrest and kill poachers, collect ivory from stockpiles, and conduct undercover investigations on black market traders. One of the crews followed the head of security in southern Kenya, Craig Millar. He led the effort to get fences put up for the farmers in the area. These farmers wanted to kill elephants because they were trampling and eating their crops. To them, the elephants were destroying their livelihood, so Craig put in effort to get fences put in. According to him, fences are the future of protecting the elephants in this area. There was also a crew following the task force in charge of tracking down "The Devil", the man responsible for most of the elephant deaths in recent years. Through lots of investigative work, the crew tracked him down and arrested him. Following this, President Barack Obama and the president of China banned the ivory trade in their respective countries. This was big with Hong Kong holding the biggest ivory trade market in the world. Andrea says that this is the first time in years that he has had hope.

This documentary has heavy sustainability implications in it. One of the main points over the whole film is the market for ivory. Prices for ivory are continuing to go up. It was explained in the documentary that the black-market traders want the extinction of elephants because as prices go up, more elephants are killed, and with less elephants price shoots up even further, giving them more and more profit. The economic nature of the ivory trade must be assessed, and that is why countries are starting to ban the trade. They are also removing the ivory from the black market by burning recovered stockpiles. This may help to reduce the sheer amount of ivory available on the market and discourage the trade.

This documentary was a very enjoyable watch. I had no idea about the sheer volume of ivory on the black market, and past that I was exposed to the prices of ivory. One sword shown in the documentary was worth over 200,000 dollars. Seeing the comparison in numbers from the 1970's to now (over a million elephants in the region to 200-400,000) made me very concerned for the endangered nature of elephants. Quite honestly this documentary made me want to put on some camouflage and go stop poachers in the middle of the night. It was extremely informative and also quite encouraging. Knowing that there are people in the fight that care for these animals and seeing the successes that they are having was awesome to see and showed me that progress is being made.

The Ivory Game: A Review by an Environmental Science Major

[henmgn · 8/10 · 25 November 2021]

Everyone is familiar with ivory and where it comes from. But not a lot of people really take the time to consider all that the ivory goes through just to get into the hands of the consumers and sellers. The amount of elephants and rhinos that die each year to poachers killing them for their ivory is insane. This documentary really allows the view to see how big of a problem it actually is. The documentary follows many people all over Africa and China in an attempt to catch a man who runs one of the biggest ivory poaching rings in Africa called Shetani or the devil because he has killed over 10,000 elephants. We also get to see a journalist go undercover to really get the facts of how corrupt the police forces are that they can be bribed to allow these smugglers to bring so many tons of ivory into China yearly. Being able to see the guard hunting the poachers in Africa and seeing the journalist talking with the people who buy this ivory was truly educational. And to see them catch Shetani after just missing him for three years was amazing. But to also see how greedy these poachers were to kill a herd of 10 elephants in the dead of night just for their tusk because it was $1500 USD (including shipping) per kilogram of ivory. The amount of money that these people have in warehouses in the form of ivory is truly insane. This documentary is a wonderful educational example of everything that is going on with this illegal poaching and trading of ivory from Africa to China, where in 2017 (a year after this documentary came out) China finally made it illegal to buy or sell ivory. Which means that people are just going to go out of their way to be more sneaky and illusive when selling or buying ivory. The symbology of burning the collected ivory at the end of the documentary was truly poetic in that it symbolized the ivory trade coming to an end.

Best

[mps_animaxfriends · 7/10 · 28 June 2020]

It makes it is so clear that the ivory trade is funded by the rich and the rich have created the market for it. Because normal people can't really afford to buy ivory that's $2000 plus.

Not nearly as exciting or moving as it might sound

[Jeremy_Urquhart · 6/10 · 13 April 2020]

This gets a passing grade because it's an important subject and has some compelling moments, but as a film, I thought this was quite weak, or at least lacking.

I got the sense that a great deal of footage was shot around a broad subject, without much in the way of structure or narrative planned ahead, and then the finished film came together in the editing. There are a few stories going on at once, and while the interviews and editing do their best to connect it all, but I didn't buy it. It felt less like a full feature film and more like watching a 6-part miniseries where you only catch 20 minutes of the first episode, 20 minutes of the second, and so on.

Hunting an endangered species like the elephant only for their ivory is terrible, and I admire the people in this film for devoting themselves to making it a thing of the past. It's important to expose the individuals and institutions who allow such a trade to happen, and if this film has changed the world at large for the better, then it deserves praise. But if you want a story, or something that progresses in a logical fashion, or just something that's compelling in a way that the best documentaries out there are, you may not find it with The Ivory Game.

Despite featuring competent visuals, music, and knowledgeable interviewees, it doesn't flow at all and is surprisingly unengaging. It's a noble film and overall not a terrible one; more just one that isn't very involving or exciting. If it sounds really up your alley, I could give it a hesitant recommendation, but otherwise I'd say go watch any of the other 5,000,000 documentaries currently on Netflix.

Earth is dying

[tiagofgouveia · 7/10 · 23 August 2018]

Great documentary about a problem that is not talked, we live in a world that people care more about how they look and what they can buy than actually solving real problems that we created... Its difficult to understand the point that we reached when theirs humans being killed to protect elephants and other animals from being extinct.

It is sad to see so many elephants being killed

[Erik_Stone · 5/10 · 11 April 2022]

Unfortunately, the idiots in the film do not understand anything about economics.

The people depicted in this, pretending to save elephants, do almost as much harm as the poachers. They are worse than the poachers in some ways, because they should know better. Destroying ivory is so harmful to living elephants.

The Chinese government funds the killing of elephants, just like the US government funds sex trafficking and the drug trade.

When you ban things that have a high, steady demand, prices rise and suppliers make more money.

Even a poacher might feel bad about killing an elephant, but these government folks feel great and special, about how they destroy elephant tusks and help poachers make more money.

This movie is very sad and sickening to watch.

An absolutely terrifying manmade crisis

[trabler · 29 August 2019]

The documentary explores operations of poachers in Africa and further trafficking of illegal ivory to Asia where it is sold to local wholesalers who subsequently can deliver it to your doorstep a 'nominal' fee. The undercover footage gives the documentary great validity and evidential basis. Must be watched - thought-provoking and horrifyingly real.