Jaws

Hell yea I’m talkin’ about Jaws.  You know, that shark movie where a town is terrorized by a shark ‘n shit.  Classic.  In fact I think I can safely say that it is probably in my top five favorite films of all time.  What’s not to like?  You got great acting, great directing, a great premise, people getting murdered by a shark, Shakespearian drama between the shark and the characters, I mean damn.  They packed a helluva lot into this summer popcorn flick.

So we all know the story right?  Well, in case there’s some weirdo out there who hasn’t seen or heard of this movie I’ll give a brief synopsis.  A giant motherfuckin’ shark starts eating people in a small New England beach town so the town hires a guy to kill it.  It’s amazing how they did so much with that one sentence.

The movie packs quite a punch from the first scene to the last but for me the best part is when Brody, Quint and Hooper are out all alone on Quint’s boat battling Jaws.  It’s so primal and poetic at the same time.  The chemistry between all three of these characters is wonderful.  Hooper is the nerdy shark expert guy who knows his way around a ship but gets a little flabbergasted when he sees probably the biggest shark in existence.  Brody is the chief of police for Amity Island, the town in which the movie takes place.  But he’s more of a complex character.  Brody moved from New York City recently and is still getting used to his new position and surroundings.  His wife is also a little apprehensive about the situation.  There’s a part where she asks one of the townspeople how long it takes to become an “islander” to which the lady replies “never.  You’re not born here, you’re not an islander, that’s it”.  A crushing response to a person who just wants to fit in.  Brody also wonders sometimes if he made the right choice.  He’s glad to not be in New York City but he’s doesn’t know if moving to a small beach town was the best decision.  But there’s a scene where Brody says that the New York crime rate is overwhelming and that in Amity Island he can make a difference.  And he lives up to that because he helps find and catch a shark that’s wasting the townspeople.  The mayor and the rest of Amity Island wanted to keep the beaches open initially because they didn’t think that Brody knew what he was talking about.  He was the guy that forced the mayor to hire Quint and solve the problem.

Speaking of Quint, this is the guy that really makes this movie incredible.  Quint is a craggy, tough, weathered sonuvabitch.  He doesn’t take shit from nobody, especially a shark.  It’s his fascination and abhorrence for the shark that makes this a beautiful and fucked up relationship.  Quint sees killing the shark as a personal vendetta.  It’s like there’s only enough room in this world for one of them.  Robert Shaw (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), The Sting) plays him perfectly too.  I really can’t imagine anyone else in that role.  Shaw is Quint.

One of the cooler deaths in Jaws is of the guy in the rowboat about halfway through the movie.  So Jaws knocks this guy out of his little rowboat but then it switches to an overhead shot (I guess I just love overhead shots ‘cause I also love the death of Arbogast in Psycho and the death of Dillon in Alien 3) and we see the shark blurry through the water coming towards him then the guy gets taken under.  Cut to a shot of Jaws attacking the guy again and then underwater where you see the guy’s bloody leg sinking to the bottom of the ocean.  Now I don’t know about you but that’s some frightening shit.  Spielberg captures how helpless people are in the water perfectly.

I know that everyone knows that they don’t show you Jaws until the last half hour of the film but you know that old thing about what’s happening off screen is more horrifying that what they could possibly show you on screen is true.  I mean, you can see bits of it here and there.  In the scene I was just talking about with the guy in the rowboat you can get a not half bad glimpse of Jaws.  So it’s not like you never see anything.  But it is interesting that this only came about because the damn mechanical beast wouldn’t work properly during production.  Spielberg actually wanted to start the movie off with the shark leaping out of the water and attacking the skinny dipper in a huge and flashy display.  If the shark had worked perfectly for the whole shoot then I wonder how different this movie would have turned out.  I mean you still have these great characters that are cast well and it still would have looked great.  Most likely it wouldn’t have been as good of a film but I wish that this alternate version existed so I could compare them.  This is definitely a case of someone being forced to be more creative because of limitations placed on them.  This is why computers kinda ruined movies.  Not all CGI is unwarranted I want to make that clear but a lot of it looks really bad.  Most of it I think.  Because people can do whatever they want with computers today it doesn’t back them into a corner to come up with interesting ways around problems.  Just my two cents.

Getting back to the movie, my favorite scene in this thing isn’t one with Jaws munching on someone’s abdomen but it’s Quint’s monologue.  He has two actually.  The first is when he tells the townspeople that he’ll catch the shark for $10,000.  This isn’t the one I’m talking about but don’t get me wrong ‘cause that’s a great fucking speech and also how we’re introduced to Quint.  Nah, what I’m talking about is the monologue he gives about the USS Indianapolis.  Now that’s some eerie shit.  I don’t really want to say what he says (of course you should watch the movie) but it gets me every time.  Shaw’s delivery, how he breaks up the sentences and his emphasis on certain words makes you feel like this guy really lived through what he’s talking about and that he’s haunted by it.  It’s why he hates fucking sharks so much.  Now it’s not clear who wrote this monologue with credit going to different people including Spielberg and even Shaw himself but whoever did write it did a pretty good job in my opinion.

So see Jaws if you haven’t or if it’s been a long time.  You won’t be disappointed unless sharks, water or grizzled as fuck boat captains don’t scare you, then you’ll probably think it’s a pretty silly movie.