The lurking fear...

Rating: 9/10 (2 February 2008)

Pop quiz hotshot: Your enjoying a day at the beach swimming on your yellow inflatable raft when sudden a movie theme starts playing in your head... tuntun tuntun tuntun... What do you do?
Get the hell out of the water, most likely.
"Jaws" is one of those "simple" horror movies. Not simple on a technical level, the production had notorious difficulties with that. Not simple on anyone part of itself, but rather simple at what it probes: the fear of being attacked by something bigger, stronger that wants to kill you. That manages to cover both psychological (hopelessness) and visceral (mutilation) aspects of human fear. The result of this KISSing (Keeping It Simple/Scary) is pretty darn effective. The famous music has become synonymous with fear and has been used a multitude of times (including 3 increasingly bad sequels) and the word "Jaws" made quite a career in the English language as a result. Maybe in a thousand years, when archaeologists discover a copy of a "Jaws" DVD they'll determine that "jaws" was our word for that big fish, when in fact we call it a "shark."
Take the opening scene. It is very simple in premise: a girl goes swimming and is first nipped by something, then thrashed around before being finally pulled underwater leaving the sound a buoy. We see no shark, no fin, no jaws (<-- get it?) or anything for that matter. If we saw the sharks or it's jaws (I'll stop with the puns, promise) then it would be clear that the film would be trying to show us that shark and how vicious it is. When, in fact, the scene shows what I had described earlier: the fear of being attack by something bigger and stronger. What it is doesn't really matter. What does matter is that the scene taps right into that fear and carries it through the movie. Progressively we see more and more of the sharks... fins, the mouth (I told you that I wouldn't say 'jaws') and finally the entire shape of the thing, but it is only when the men hunting it see it too.
Overall, this is one of not very many truly effective scary movies, because it doesn't just strive for shock, but also for a much needed element of being down to Earth. And it succeeds. --- 9/10
Rated PG for terror/violence and gore. Ages 13+