A documentary by Dan Stone. Rated PG. Plays Tuesday, November 17, and Friday through Monday, November 20 to 23, at the Vancity Theatre

Forget Johnny Depp. If you want to see real pirates in action, abandon the tropics and set sail for Antarctic waters with a ragtag crew of dreadlocked, lip-pierced, and (in at least one case) white-haired eco-warriors looking to halt the slaughter of whales.

Actually, that’s two ragtag crews of Sea Shepherds, one aboard the icebreaking Farley Mowat, the other on the smaller, flimsier Robert Hunter. Their two-month mission, beautifully filmed by multiple cameras at the end of 2006, is to keep a Japanese whaling fleet from killing whales in what’s supposed to be a sea-life sanctuary.

As detailed in such recent films as The Cove and The End of the Line, Japan skirts international law by declaring that its commercial harvesting is done in the name of research. Yeah, and let’s hope you don’t mind if “science” needs to know what your children taste like with wasabi.

About four dozen sailors from more than 10 countries have agreed to risk their necks and test moral limits in freezing waters where seasickness, icebergs, and boredom are among the challenges—when they’re not hurling stink bombs at the illegal whalers. This is the driving philosophy of group founder Paul Watson, who also helped start Greenpeace, which later, one could say, grew too cautious to take real chances.

Watson’s activism, as glimpsed in The Edge of the World, is mostly that of an articulate publicist, as he explains his group’s current ventures from his quarters on the Farley Mowat. Although alive to the ambiguities, writer-director Dan Stone obviously got the memo. And you come away from the film wondering why more people aren’t reading between the lines.