Book Vs. Movie

Rating: 10/10 (5 September 2010)

Who are we kidding, this film is a classic. Not much more to add.
What I want to point out is that Jaws is the exception that proves a rule. IN this case, the rule is, Books are always better than the Movie. It's almost always true in all but a few cases, and in the few cases, the book wasn't any great shakes to start with.
Peter Benchley's Jaws was a heavily marketed book because they knew they were going to make a film out of it. The problem is, if they filmed it as written, it would have been confusing, the characters unlikable (seriously, you'd have been cheering for the Shark!) and the subplots weren't even logical. Thankfully, they scrapped almost all of it in Carl Gottlieb's rewrite.
Then you have the factor of Spielberg himself, then a young, cutting edge director. (As opposed to today, where he's such a mega-producer, no one dares tell him he's making garbage like "IJ4: Crystal Skull".).
Finally, you had the actors, perfectly cast for these parts, taking them and making them their own.