Still the greatest 'underwater menace' movie

Rating: 10/10 (8 August 2016)

Twenty-five years after it was first released, Spielberg's timeless classic still hasn't aged a day and retains that chilling suspense and tension which first propelled it into the limelight in the first place. A masterpiece in fear and terror, this is an expertly-crafted film (everything about it is just right: the pacing, the story, the acting, the cinematography) packed with believable, realistic characters who you know and care about, and plenty of nail-biting moments and scares. It also boasts an incredible last fifty minutes, which is basically a cat and mouse game between Scheider, Dreyfuss, and Shaw and the Great White itself.
At first, the film introduces us to the main characters, showing them investigating and sometimes floundering about, unsure of what action to take. The scenes of victims getting pulled under the waves are occasionally gruesome and quite terrifying, especially for a non-swimmer such as myself. As the attacks grow more frequent there are lots of those scenes of people panicking which PIRANHA spoofed so mercilessly. All this is in line with the classic ominous music which quite rightly won an Oscar and gives the film that extra suspense. Having watched this film as a child, I can verify that there is one cheap shock which scared the heck out of me when I was younger. It involves Dreyfess investigating an abandoned ship. As he examines the hull underwater, all of a sudden a white head pops out of a hole, one of the eyes eaten away by fish. This alone helped me to have loads of nightmares and, seen today, it's still pretty disturbing.
The final hour ups the film a notch into classic status. Essentially it becomes a three-hander, and Spielberg piles on the tense atmosphere. A lot of the film plays on our fear of the unknown, giving us brief glimpses of the shark but nothing more. I'm not surprised that this film put people off swimming in the ocean. Thankfully when the shark does make itself seen at the end, the giant model used is pretty good (for the time) and pretty menacing. Only one shot, of it rearing up against the boat, looks false. Other scenes of it gliding just under the water's surface are terrific.
The acting from the three main cast members is excellent, all three men are as good as each other in a different way. A hairy Richard Dreyfess is the likable, slightly clumsy marine biologist, while Roy Scheider is the tough police chief who you wouldn't like to mess with. We don't really learn a lot about his character except that he's honest, fair, and above all else a family man. And that's enough for us, to know that he's a decent character who will inevitably win out against the menace at the end. However, I would say that the superb mannered turn from Robert Shaw as the ship's captain is the highlight of the film. Shaw instils his character with a kind of gruff charm that makes it impossible not to like him.
In the final half an hour, the isolated ship starts taking in water and slowly sinks, while the shark plays with the humans on board and the waters keep getting redder and redder with blood. The action-packed finale is truly nail-biting and, I would say, one of the best endings in a film ever. All of this and more helps JAWS to remain the final word in underwater horror. Suffice to say, a handful of lesser imitations followed, author/screenwriter Peter Benchley spent the rest of his life rewriting the same kind of tale and the three sequels got progressively worse.