When his family are murdered by human hunters, a grief-stricken Orca whale goes on a rampage of revenge against the people responsible…
“He followed you”
After covering the Jaws series, I felt like staying in the water for another aquatic nightmare.
Orca turned out to be a very different proposition from what I expected.
The movie has been criticised as a Jaws ripoff, but aside from being based around a large fish who kills people, it bears almost no similarities.
God, I love this movie.
Jaws is great, but this movie hit such a sweet spot.
While the film’s original poster and full title foreground the Orca’s credentials as an apex predator, Orca is more like a tragic melodrama - a tale of two characters forced into a death spiral of vengeance.
If the film is a thriller, it fits in the vigilante subgenre - it is Death Wish with the Orca as Charlies Bronson.
While the film tries to dress itself up with science, the film does not operate in terms of logic, but powerful emotions - it is an operatic tale of vengeance.
The movie is more sympathetic toward the title creature - Ennio Morricone’s score leans into the Orca’s tragedy, and we get a literal presentation going through the Orcas, and building empathy for them.
We do not even get introduced to Richard Harris’s doomed hunter until after we meet the Orca in happier times, a happy couple jumping out of the water in front of a sunset.
The whales cavort in a sequence that feels akin to Paul Kersey’s vacation with his family in the first Death Wish movie.
When we are introduced to the humans, they are callous and jocular intruders of the sea, going after a great white shark (in the film’s one overt diss at Jaws).
The scene of the Orca’s mate’s death is tragic and grotesquely violent - as the Orca’s mate is hoisted into the air, her baby grotesquely flops out of her belly, and falls to the deck.
The film cuts back to the Orca with mouth agape screaming.
While we spend more time with Harris, all the emotional perspective is embedded with the whale.
After the deaths of his family, the film stays with the whale. After it saves its partner’s body from the hunters, he carries her body to shore and leaves her behind.
One element that helps the film’s melodramatic simplicity is its economy - Orca runs 90 minutes and does not waste time:
The Orca is immediately on the hunt - he attacks the boat, kills a sailer and eyeballs Richard Harris before leaving with its partner’s body.
As the human lead/anti-villain of the piece, Richard Harris is terrific - his husky voice and melancholy presence anchors the whole affair.
As the film progresses, his lackadaisical sailor is revealed as a tormented soul, who hides his own pain through a cavalier attitude to his life and work. By the end of the film, he is a more sober and empathetic figure, bonding with his adversary and willing on his own demise.
While Jaws has its signifiers of the seventies (particularly in the Brodys as a reflection of the white flight taking place in major cities), Orca feels more like a time capsule of the period’s key themes - the interweaving of environmental devastation, growing awareness of whales, and colonialism (Will Sampson makes an appearance as a local indigenous voice who speaks of the community’s relationship with the whale). It is a potent mix, and pleasingly uncompromising in its allegiance to the title character.
Orca is not high art - it features a scene where our aquatic avenger knocks out a gasoline pipe and blows up a town - but in its own bizarre way, it works as an unapologetically anti-human action drama.
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