Epitome of Tension.

Rating: 8/10 (29 May 2007)

Much of this comment will, I realize, be meandering, spotty, and anecdotal, but what with more than 500 reviews of this movie already on file, how much can be lost by a bit of negative entropy? I think we can skip the story except to say fish eats man, man finally kills fish. The fish was called Bruce, or was it Moby Bruce. Roy Scheider is the chief of police of a resort fishing village on an island. He's the local authority so often found in monster movies. Murray Hamilton is the superior who doesn't trust or believe Scheider. Richard Dreyfus is the requisite scientist -- often but not always a toothsome babe. In this case the expert can be a man because Scheider is already happily married, with children, as the first half of the movie establishes. Robert Shaw is Quint, an anomaly, the rough, tough shark fisherman who has contempt for ordinary people. Usually that's part of the police chief's role.
The movie was a HUGE popular and commercial success, and for good reason. The visuals and special effects are perfectly realized, the music nail-bitingly suspense inducing, and the characters are not cardboard cutouts as they so often are in routine action thrillers.
Take Scheider's sheriff. He has a family and he loves them but the bond is projected in everyday ways. A cheaper script would have him telling his kids, just as he's about to leave on a suicide mission, how much he loves them and if he doesn't come back -- well, just remember to do what your mother tells you and don't forget to brush your teeth regularly and visit a dentist twice a year and stay away from women with barbed-wire tattoos. Scheider does none of that, and if he ever even kisses his wife, I managed to miss it this time around.
Furthermore, unlike so many action/science fiction/horror protagonists, Scheider is flawed. Not seriously, but still -- afraid of being on the water? So phobic that he must consume a couple of bottles of wine and get drunk in order to board a boat? It's played mostly for comic effect, but Scheider isn't given any excuse for his fears either. He didn't watch his Dad drown or get waterboarded as a prisoner or anything like that.
The most interesting character, though, is Shaw's Quint, the crack shark hunter. We're talking major league Hemingwayism here. Shaw wears a fishing cap just like Papa's, he's vulgar, he dislikes college kids, he drinks home-made "hootch", he's been through a war -- a man's man in every respect. And when it comes to Bruce, he is wrong at every turn. He makes all the mistakes in the book out of an excess of self confidence, smashing the boat's radio, deliberately burning out an engine bearing, and paying for it as a Hemingway hero would. Gulp. There has rarely been a more interesting case study of overreaching.
Sharks as a group aren't evil in themselves. As Dreyfus explains, all they do is eat and make little sharks, only one or two incremental evolutionary units below humans in those respects. Hordes of three-foot blue sharks used to come up in our chum stream off Sandy Hook and I used to reach into the water from our outboard, grab one by the tail, and flip it flapping and spinning overhead. They're like pussy cats. It's only when they get bigger that they get spookier. I was on a fishing boat anchored about fifty feet of Olosega Island in Samoa and a couple of guys dived overboard and swam ashore in the most casual way. I happened to look down over the other side and there, barely moving through the electric blue water, was a dusky monster I estimated at about eight feet. I was tickled pink I wasn't swimming along joking and laughing with the others. In this instance, Bruce gets his just deserts. He's got an explosive CO2 container lodged in his cheek. The enormous blast fills the air with tiny chondroblasts.
The director and composer haven't misjudged their audience often in this movie but they get carried away in one noticeable scene. Now get this. Bruce has eaten several people and has just revealed himself as more of a whale than a shark, and he's performed incredible feats of strength, enough even to impress Quint, who has seen everything. Now Bruce has a couple of highly buoyant plastic barrels attached to him and he's plowing through the water paying no attention to the drag. Scheider, Shaw, and Dreyfus are pursuing him in the fishing boat, its engine full out, barely able to keep up with this man-eating beast. And the musical score suddenly switches from its well-know THUM THUM -- THUM THUM -- to light-hearted happy music, as if we were watching two youngsters having an exciting but tame adventure, an exhilarating horse race through the woods. I wonder if anyone else felt the music was a little discordant. I'm happy though that Shaw, for all his faults, used the word "hootch" in this movie. It means "illegal liquor" and it comes from the language of the Tlingit Indians who live along the mountainous northwest coast of Alaska and Canada, a cheerful, industrious group. Not enough Tlingit words have been borrowed into English. "Cayuse" is the only other one I can think of.