The Greatest Film ....EVER! (part one)

Rating: Null/10 (15 June 2001)

*Spoilers will indeed follow*
What a load of crap, right. A shark starts eating the locals of an island community, putting a sheriff, who happens to be afraid of water, on the spot. The selfish mayor opposes the sheriff in shutting down the beaches because its bad for business, and puts some tourists out for lunch. Sheriff gets mad when son almost gets chomped so he enlists the aid of a cocky oceanologist and a crazed fisherman to kill the shark. These three go out in a rickety old fishing boat to do battle, become amazed at shark's enormous size and swimming skills, and proceed to get their rickety old fishing boat smashed up by the gilled beast. Cocky and stupid oceanologist goes down in a shark-proof cage, and narrowly escapes with his life. The shark, apparently feeling confident, jumps on to the back of the boat and eats the fisherman. Sheriff then manages to blow up the shark into millions of pieces before swimming gleefully back to shore with oceanologist.
Yikes! That sounds terrible, does it not. But what is pretty unbelievable is that I just finished decribing to you the greatest film ever made. Now let me explain why.
Jaws was the breakthrough film by a then unrealized film director named Steven Spielberg. Very young, very talented, and still possibly naive about the film industry, he undertook the overly ambitious and utterly preposterous task of bringing this story to the big screen. At his disposal: the prestigious lineage of Zanuck filmmakers (lots of money), a talented cast (none of them A-list), a devoted crew (very good swimmers), and a mechanical shark. Luckily for him that shark never worked.
The shark in the film becomes an unseen evil because, due to the technical difficulties involved, Spielberg and friends were not able to show it as much as they wanted. This makes the film less of a gimicky B-list monster movie and more of a taut suspense-horror-adventure film. Not seeing the shark makes the viewer more uneased, not being able to know where it is and what it is going to do next. I mean if you were swimming in the ocean, how many of you would see the shark coming anyways. All we know is that when that thumping music starts playing, the shark is there, and its going to try to eat someone. Actually, they should have gave a cast credit at the end with shark played by John Williams, because his simple but very effective score steals the movie from any actor or mechanical shark that appears.