Omoo-Omoo, the Shark God (1949) is a rather dreadful story of stolen eyes, featuring some of the worst facets of Western man: unfettered greed, even in the face of disaster; lust; alcoholism; casual antagonism; desire for power; disrespect for divinities, especially those of people seen as backward; oh, yeah, and …
BAD MOVIEMAKING.
On a small sailing ship of the early 1800s, in which most of the crew are belligerent drunks, the owner-master is deathly ill with the undiagnosed illness of having stolen the eyes of an island divinity. He doesn’t actually have them, mind you; he took them and hid them so close to the statue of the divine Ooma that it’s fortunate that said statue doesn’t take dumps, if you catch my drift. Yet, he’s still ill. A petty god, it is. Which is sort of like the puny god, Loki, but never mind that.
Between the weather of the Pacific Ocean, drunken brawls, and an utterly irrelevant scene of a moray eel and an octopus in a fight to the death, we’re lucky to reach the island, which sounded suspiciously like Tahiti with a different vowel of some sort. Once there, will we be retrieving the eyes and presenting them to the villagers and their god, in hopes of a metaphysical cure?
Nyah. This is all about the greed of the captain. And of his daughter, who, upon having her father die in her arms, is also infected with greed. It’s like a disease, except you’d think if you were a god you’d be infecting the infidels with a disease compelling the return of the eyes, wouldn’t you? Maybe I shouldn’t have asked, gods are always mysterious and trying to teach lessons that happen to be of little use to anyone.
From the bottom of the pit, it’s all downhill, and it doesn’t really turn out all that well for anyone but the villagers, who appear to suffer from the era’s usual and disorienting movie making habit of using natives for the flunkies and Caucasians for the chiefs. Still, I liked the dancing.
And not much else. Definitely a movie to watch when the muscles are hurting from over-exertion and your sense of aesthetic standards has seized up. If you really think you want to watch it. You will if you’re a Herman Melville completist, as it claims to be based on Melville’s Ooma. But don’t take that as a recommendation.
