Movie Review - Jaws

When it comes to really great horror movies, Jaws is a movie that has been redone in one form or another. It is brilliant in its pacing, story telling and intricacies. While three subpar sequels kind of made the franchise lose a bit of steam, there is no doubt the first movie was groundbreaking.

I'm certainly not going to ignore that this is a movie that came from a book. Peter Benchley's book is pretty captivating, but for me, the movie takes my entertainment of the story to a whole new level. Benchley also wrote the screenplay and in that way, I don't really feel like anyone stole his ideas. Instead, he just built a more visual story, versus a story built in the framework of your mind's eye.

The story revolves around Roy Scheider as Martin Brody, the reluctant hero, a police chief who had been worked in the big city before moving his family to the summer East Coast travel destination of Amity. The move is all good and fine, right up until a 25-foot Great White takes up shop and begins devouring swimmers/boaters/dogs/boats/etc.

Scheider plays the role of an aquaphobe to a 'T', and is right at home with his interpretation of someone out of his element. Really, the casting of the movie could not be better. Robert Shaw just 'is' that gnarled salty sea dog, Quint, whose cursing and old-school ways make him someone that you laugh at for his over-the-top hatred of city-folk, women, and anything other than sea life. Richard Dreyfuss plays Hooper, the second-generation rich kid (immediately the natural arch enemy of Quint) who is the shark expert.

Basically the movie feels like it split between two parts: when the three main characters are on land, trying to decide how to fight the shark, and then when Brody, Quint and Hooper get on Quint's boat, Orca, and take the fight to the shark.

Likely one of the single most powerful scenes in the movie has nothing to do with the movie's shark (named Bruce by the filming crew, in 'honor' of Steven Spielberg's lawyer). Instead it is when Quint relays a story of when he was on the U.S.S. Indianapolis. Basically, in that three or four minutes, the camera is just on him, and he relays a story about the ship that delivered the Hiroshima bomb, was sunk by a submarine, and had hundreds of crew members eaten by sharks as they waited for rescue.

This movie may have been one of the single-largest killers of sharks in the last 30 years, but basically I think that is because it was done so well. A poorly-done movie wouldn't generate this kind of response. But because it captures a real fear, bottles it, and hits you with it over the course of three hours, sharks are branded killers. I guess I'm not going to go into my feelings on the issue any more than that sharks are wild animals and should be treated as such. They are just doing what they are do.

You don't actually see the shark until midway through the movie, likely one of the better movie decisions or blunders (the shark machine didn't react well to salt water) of all time. Your mind creates a lot of suspense and a lot of anticipation throughout the first half of the movie because you never actually see the beast. It isn't until Brody is chumming when he and the audience first see the shark. Scheider then produces one of the all-time great on-the-fly movie quotes in 'We're going to need a bigger boat...'.

Music-wise, this is about as rich as a score can be. It is full symphony, it conveys mystery, horror, suspsense, all of it. Appropriately for the subject matter, there is a lot of what sounds like harp involvement in the music. To me it sounds very fluid, very appropriate for a movie on the sea.

Spoiler Alert

I find the different endings of the book and movie pretty interesting. In the book, Brody ends up in the water with the shark (Hooper and Quint have both been killed by this point). The shark is approaching Brody and basically just stops and dies. For a fairly tremendous book, I found this to be one of the all-time great letdowns. Maybe it was trying to get at a larger point (even forces of nature are subject to their own mortality or something along those lines) but for the most part, I left the book feeling disapointed.

The movie more than made up for that blah ending. Brody faces the approaching shark with gun in hand, shooting an airtank in the animal's mouth and blowing the shark into 8590487857483849494959585 pieces (approximately). It is a great movie moment. Hooper (who had a little more character development in the book) lives in the movie version...It didn't seem quite right, but then again Dryfuss is a pretty decent guy.

With this franchise, I am a pretty big believer that the cumulative stars given to Jaws 2, Jaws 3 and Jaws 4 don't add up to the amount of stars given to the first movie. Jaws is as good as horror movies get.

5 stars out of 5.

The musical score is for the ages.