By Keri O’Shea
Earth’s oceans; vast realms, places which seem to maintain their mystique, even as outer space begins to yield its own. Beautiful, alien, incomprehensible, and brimming with mysterious life, the seas have never lost their fascination for us. They are also infested with gilled fucks, hell-bent on the destruction of Mankind come what may: this is essentially what cinema taught us in the wake (see what I did there?) of Jaws in 1975; soon, every potential aquatic foe had it in for us. Free Willy was nothing more than a glint in the director’s eye. Heck, it wasn’t just the sea, either; from bees to bears, Nature was more or less done in the 70s. Done. Sick of our cruelty, sick of our pollution, sick of our fucking haircuts.
Still, so much as a formula quickly developed as to how these angry nature movies played out, Orca: The Killer Whale is an oddity. Based on the title (which has an extraneous exclamation mark in some early press, a la 50s sci-fi and horror) and the poster art, you might expect high schlock; look at the cast list and you might think you were going to get another Moby Dick (well, okay, maybe not when you see that Bo Derek is attached to this film). The truth is that you do indeed get something in-between. If that intrigues you, then read on…
The at-first stereotypical Irishman, Captain Nolan (played by Richard Harris. Yes, Richard Harris) makes a living capturing and trading in large aquatic creatures, drugging them via harpoon so that he can get them onto his boat and then sell them to aquariums. We meet Nolan and his crew as they’re tracking a Great White shark; marine biologist Rachel Bedford (Charlotte Rampling) is diving in the area at the time too with a colleague, and they narrowly escape the shark and then Nolan’s harpoon in pretty quick succession. The shark is finally killed, though, by two killer whales – creatures which just happen to be one of Bedford’s specialisms. If her subsequent conversation with the captain is intended to make him respect the whales, however, then it doesn’t work, and Nolan soon gets the idea of capturing an orca instead. He and his crew try, but fail – harpooning and killing a pregnant female in the process. Her furious mate then sets about tracking Nolan and his boat, intending to wreak vengeance upon him…
I know, I know. It’s a funny thing: in so many of these types of films, there’s an agenda at work. An awakening conscience about animal welfare is crafted into a dramatic narrative, forms the bedrock of the plot, and tries to teach us a few things along the way. Fine. Sadly, to make the narrative dramatic enough, filmmakers end up making the animal in question into the enemy, and thus eminently killable, which somewhat undoes the animal welfare angle. That happens to an extent in Orca. The furious creature unleashes his vengeance upon Nolan in a sustained campaign of violence and intimidation until you end up feeling rather sorry for the captain; he never intended to kill the female, after all. Mixed messages, that is.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg (heh) though, isn’t it? Read what I’ve just written there again. The fact that here we have an intelligent species, sure, but one completely anthropomorphised in the film until the orca has become a kind of wicked assassin, well…it’s a bit daft, no? And yet, that’s our storyline. You may be able to take that on face value quite happily in certain types of film, but here, with it being handled in such a sober fashion, the tone of the film can get a little confusing. This is no exploitation film filled with stock footage and two-bit actors: there’s an impressive cast here, real characterisation, frequent evidence of high production values, and an Ennio Morricone score which I’d go so far as to say is bloody sumptuous. All of that, some lovely photography and a climactic end sequence which looks great on camera, and yet we’re expected to accept elements in the plot which just don’t follow.
Yep, this is a slightly schizophrenic film. Nonetheless, I was engaged by it, if only in trying to fathom it out (and I know I’m doing all of these puns by the way). There’s certainly plenty to like about Orca, for all its fundamental oddness, and for a spin on the Nature Gone Bad genre which you may not have encountered yet, it’s a decent film in its own right. Can you really argue with Charlotte Rampling in a wetsuit, anyway?
Orca: the Killer Whale is available now on Region 2 DVD from Studiocanal.