ORCA No Free Willy jokes, but only because I can't think of any It won me over. I don't know how - maybe I've just endured too many really bad recent animal-rampage movies, but this ridiculous movie won me over. Or maybe it's because this movie never really seems to realize how absurd it is, and carries itself through to its logical conclusion without pausing for a moment of reflection to realize, hey, this is freakin' ridiculous! Opening to a whole lot of "Behold, the idyllic beauty of the killer whale in its natural environment!" stuff, Orca does not get off to a very promising beginning. We see some divers get their asses saved from a shark by the timely arrival of a killer whale, and very soon, we bear witness to a lecture by a professor, or something, played by Charlotte Rampling, where she says that the killer whale is "Without challenge, the most powerful animal on the planet." While a power struggle between a killer whale and, say, a sperm whale might well result in an upset for the smaller whale, I think the words "without challenge" are taking things a bit too far. This lengthy lecture goes on to some unconvincing claims about how intelligent killer whales are (she basically says they're at least as smart as we are and if they could understand what we were saying, they'd think we were retarded). Reportedly based (probably VERY loosely) on a true story, Orca stars Richard Harris as a Newfoundland fisherman who tries capturing a male killer whale alive to sell to an aquarium. But he misses and accidentally spears its mate (that's gratitude for ya...damn humans). Things get messy, and the whale dies, pissing off the male like you've never seen a whale get pissed off before. See a killer whale swim into a propeller! If that's not entertainment in your book, then later on you get to see Bo Derek lose a leg. The male, apparently crushed with grief (stop laughing!), pushes its mate onto the beach (the cetacean equivalent of a burial at sea?). After some talking with Rampling (and of course seeing the consequences of his actions firsthand), the fisherman feels great remorse about what happened and it's clear that he would make amends if he could. But the whale doesn't want to make amends, it wants revenge, and it's going to do anything it can to ensure that it gets it. Now, I'm not in the least bit convinced that killer whales are capable of the kind of vengefulness that this movie depicts (and even explicitly lines out before it happens in Rampling's lecture), but the key is, if you can swallow that and swallow that this killer whale is as intelligent as it is, Orca is a pretty rewarding movie. The big advantage killer whales have for this kind of movie over, say, sharks, is that you can train killer whales to do damn near anything you want them to. The big disadvantage, is mostly in public perception. For most people, unless we've seen one of those things take a seal cub sitting on the shore (and damn if that isn't even more fun to watch than the croc and the gazelle), killer whales feel basically like the pandas of the sea. Cute, playful, black and white, but hardly menacing. Orca does what it can to correct on this, but it's not always successful. For one thing, the damn thing always looks like it's smiling, and not in a creepy crocodile way. In Jaws, we hardly ever saw the shark, largely because it was an animatronic effect that really wasn't particularly good. Here, we have the real animal, and we see it all the time; sometimes this is good, sometimes it ain't. I didn't much like Harris's performance at first, but he grew on me; a simple man (very simple - he has to squint and think about it when reading the word "mythology" aloud) with simple motives, suddenly forced with some very difficult decisions. This movie isn't anything quite so simple as a "nature's -revenge" movie; the whale has its own (anthropomorphized) motives, and the fisherman has his own tough decisions to make. Any concern about personal safety aside, would it be right or wrong to go out and fight the beast? No easy answers here; for that matter, different characters present some compelling reasons for fight and flight. Now, not everything in a movie like this is going to work. Occasionally, it feels like it's going to go right down the crapper, particularly in one scene where the whale somehow manages to blow up what appears to be an oil refinery, jumping out of the water and splashing down the whole time. The revelation that Harris's own wife and child were once senselessly killed seems like a bit of a throwaway, and Rampling's occasional voiceovers are distracting and unnecessary. I could also have done without the "wise Indian" guy played by Will Sampson (just once, I wanna see a movie with a really FOOLISH Indian), but I did like how he didn't back the choice I thought he would, and gave his own well-considered reasons for it. Between him and Deneuve, and the anthropomorphized motives, ideas, and feelings they ascribe to the whale, the beast actually manages to accumulate something of a personality; it is not merely a vengeance-crazed monster, it has a definite goal and a definite plan as to how to attain it. Still, somehow, I was able to swallow (if only for the length of this film) the notion of killer whales being as described here, and thus, I enjoyed the movie as a whole, particularly the icy climax. It might be a bit of a stretch for me to say that finally, I'm seeing a "big animal runs amok" movie that does it the way it should be done, but I did like how it was done here. With some uncredited work done by Robert Towne, the otherwise Italian screenwriting team crafts a tale which is perhaps way more poignant than it has any right to be. Much credit must also be given to director Michael Anderson for playing it completely straight; man, I can't even begin to imagine how much this might have looked like comedy on paper. Good score by Ennio Morriconne, too. Orca is no Jaws, but it shouldn't be Jaws. It is what it is, and for my money, is pretty cool. BACK TO THE O's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE