PG, 92 min.
Director: Michael Anderson
Writers: Luciano Vincenzoni,
Sergio Donati
Starring: Richard Harris,
Charlotte Rampling, Keenan Wynn, Peter Hooten, Bo Dereck, Will Sampson, Robert
Carradine, Scott Walker
Certainly in many ways
“Orca” is a ridiculous movie. It’s a shameless attempt by Hollywood to
capitalize on the success of Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” from two years prior.
It’s taken from an Italian script—cleaned up for Hollywood by an uncredited
Robert Towne—stars two British actors who were known to American audiences but
far from the A-list, and it grossly misrepresents the behaviors of killer
whales and the terrible practices of the industry involved in hunting them.
However, it’s a surprisingly good revenge story.
The story follows a
fisherman who catches big deadly fish for aquariums. His primary catches are
sharks until he discovers a pod of killer whales in the area he’s fishing.
Despite warnings against hunting the whales by a local scientist, he pursues the
pod and botches a live capture of the female, who miscarries while on the boat
as the bull whale looks on. The whale then sets out a plot of revenge against
the captain and his entire crew. Complicating matters is the fact that the
local fishermen blame the captain’s quest for a killer whale for driving their
fish away.
The movie has a basic Dead
Teenager horror movie set up as the whale picks off crewmembers one by one in
increasingly unique ways, especially considering that the whale is confined to
the water, while the crew is not. The final act finds the captain and a small
crew chasing the whale north into the polar ice cap. The sequence has echoes of
the final chapters of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”. In many ways the captain
created the monster the killer whale became, and creator and creation have the
final showdown in the frozen north just as in the Shelley classic.
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