83
The Ivory Game may be a harsh wakeup call to anyone concerned about the future of the largest land mammal, but it’s also a keen evaluation of the efforts being made to correct the situation.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
75
The Film Stage by Jared Mobarak
While the movie provides common sense scenarios, its success lies in putting faces to the issue. It highlights heroes and villains to transform abstract numbers into human beings. That power trumps any lack of cinematic brilliance because this type of documentary seeks exposure and potential hope.
70
The New York Times by Ken Jaworowski
While more information on the animals and their ecosystems is needed, the stakes described here are immense, as is the sorrow over majestic creatures massacred only so that their tusks can be made into baubles.
80
The Ivory Game depicts humankind both at its deplorable worst and at its best. Its burning images will sear through conscience and consciousness but there is faint hope in the lasting hoof-print they leave.
58
The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo
Unlike a lot of other advocacy docs—films that seek to raise awareness regarding some serious issue, often concluding with a call to action—Netflix’s The Ivory Game offers something spectacularly visual: elephants.
70
There are moments when the movie tugs at your heart, but the subject matter, because it’s so epic, deserves an even more probing and definitive treatment.
80
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
Brings a new urgency to an old subject: the ivory trade, which is threatening the world’s elephants. This threat has not been cancelled or brought under control, as I had assumed. The film persuasively argues that it is all but out of control: so much so that elephants are in danger of being wiped out in the wild in just a matter of years.
70
It’s a wealth of information The Ivory Game vitally offers, and action it means to incite. That may well be enough to get audiences involved.
70
Los Angeles Times by Sheri Linden
The grim economic realities behind such trafficking are glancingly acknowledged. There’s real impact, though, in the anger and grief of law enforcement officials and conservationists when their tracking leads them to elephant carcasses.
90
The Hollywood Reporter by Stephen Farber
What is admirable about Ivory Game is that it recognizes the complexity of the issues.