Groundbreaking & still scary

Rating: 7/10 (17 February 2005)

A 25-foot Great White shark is doing what he knows best  swimming around and eating when he gets hungry. In this case, his diet consists mostly of the people off the coast of Amityville, and Martin Brody (Scheider) the newly hired police chief has to not only protect the townspeople but also find the shark and kill it. Unfortunately, he has a few strikes against him right out of the box; the Mayor of Amityville is so mercenary he pretty much has to have a body dropped in his lap before he will acquiesce to closing the beach, he hires a crusty old curmudgeon of a shark hunter (Quint, played by Robert Shaw) who, while being good at what he does, has a beef with everyone who comes in contact with him (particularly oceanographer Matt Hooper, played by Richard Dreyfuss), and finally, Brody suffers from a little thing called hydrophobia.
The story is simple, yet the film is so well put together that it has held up as a horror classic for the last thirty years. Spielberg, at the time with only a few films and television shows under his directing belt, created a masterpiece with the film "Jaws", a film that is so good; its flaws become almost trivial when making an overall assessment of the film. Several great things occurred due to serendipity with "Jaws". Probably the best known was the trouble the crew had with the mechanical shark that led to underexposure of the monster; subsequently leading to a greater scare with the shard did appear. Spielberg, even with these formative films, knew how to create suspense and tension. The image of the three men on a rickety boat in the middle of the ocean where a man-eating shark who is looking for a 5th victim awaits is pretty scary. And that is one of the less obvious moments  never mind the shark bringing down a young boy, a dog, a young woman and man. (Unusually, the goriest actually being the death of the child.) Throw in a now iconic soundtrack and we have ourselves an instant classic.
Formally reviewing "Jaws" is pretty pointless when the movie is not only thirty years out of the can, but has been analyzed to pieces, but a mention has to be made about its lasting effect on pop culture. I know of at least one person who still will not go in the water as a direct result of this film, and while it is fair to expect that I was completely terrified of this film when I was 7 or 8, I'll admit that the movie poster still scares the hell out of me. I think the greatest thing that I found with "Jaws" is that a film that I remembered being so terrifying as a kid actually turned into a film that was terrifying for a completely different reasons when viewed as an adult. With this viewing I found "Jaws" to be more spine-chillingly suspenseful than anything; I really felt a sense of hopelessness for the plight of these men, and was scared on their behalf  more of an adult kind of terror than anything that simply goes "Boo!" "Jaws" isn't perfect  it actually has a pretty convenient ending that made me go, "Wait  but- how will they.huh?" But like I said earlier, it's things like this that make you realize that the rest of the film was good enough to forgive this transgression. I have always had a conflicted relationship with Steven Spielberg films; on the one hand, and as a self-labeled life long film student, I know how commercial his films are. But on the other hand, I can't deny that he makes damn good films. Maybe I should just lighten up about it and just enjoy, which I did while watching "Jaws" again, many years after seeing it for the first time. 8/10 --Shelly