Who the hell doesn’t like Jaws?
If you don’t, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I was just starting to like you. I’d hate for us to go sour so soon.
There have been a lot of killer animal movies before and after Spielberg’s landmark aquatic adventure/horror flick, but this is a rare one that paints such a vivid setting and offers characters that make us feel like we’re hanging out with them rather than merely watching. Its sun shines into your pores, its saltwater goes up your nose, the stench off of sweaty seaman Robert Shaw will knock you down and its shark bites your ass off. Whether soaking in the atmosphere of a folksy east coast beach town or letting us hear the creaking wood of a madman’s rickety old boat, this film swallows us whole. It was the movie sensation of 1975. It remains a sensation today. Nobody can make a killer fish movie ever again without being compared to it. No other shark movie tops it. Not many other Hollywood thrillers do, either. Everything clicks into place here. It’s a perfect movie if you like ’em when they put you on the edge of your seat.
So much that was mystifying in 1975 has become less so today, but there’s one thing that definitely hasn’t: the motherfucking gigantic goddamn ocean. It’s huge, it’s wet, it’s salty, we can’t breathe in it, most of us know little about it and there are things in there that are perfectly happy to eat us. A bloodthirsty shark may as well be an evil alien. We can’t communicate with it and it looks so much stronger than us. When it bites down on you from below, you often don’t even see it coming. Spielberg dives deep into those fears here and brings back blood and dark humor.
One thing about this movie that makes it still a breath of fresh air today is how its cast is full of “everyman” types (most movie producers in the present can’t get seem to get their minds around that one). There are no sex symbols here. Fortysomething, thoroughly lined Roy Scheider is our hero with a face straight off the streets. Richard Dreyfuss has a big oceanographer brain and he knows absurdity when he sees it, but isn’t much a physical specimen. Robert Shaw is a sun-beaten, sea-weathered and sideburned old rat from the depths.
The juicy conflict in this film is between old school masculinity (represented by Shaw’s brooding World War II vet) and the educated, sarcastic modern man (represented by Dreyfuss, not yet even 30 and whom one can’t help but notice sort of resembles Spielberg; meanwhile, police chief Roy Scheider represents the audience, the man who knows fuck-all about sharks). The two entities meet head-to-head here on a boat about the size of a Ford F-150. They argue, insult each other, get drunk together, compare scars and eventually admit a grudging respect (Shaw’s monologue about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis might be the best scene in the film). After all, movie brat Spielberg respects his elders. He should. They taught him all of his best tricks.