"For $10,000 I'll give you the head... the tail... the whole damn thing."

Rating: 10/10 (5 May 2000)

I'd love to teach the screenplay of Jaws to a bunch of fresh-faced young'in film students, who may or may not have seen the film before (I got introduced to it at about the right age, 12 or 13, and watched it steadily over the years, including once in a marine biology class in high school - why I don't know, but it was an annual tradition for the teacher, funny especially that the film gets some things wrong biologically speaking but whatever). It's a script that thrives on character development and interaction, and shows that a three-act structure is not really a cut-and-dry thing.
Actually what is so lovely about the film is how it's really a two-fer, a kind of prototype of what one might see Tarantino do later on with some of his films - From Dusk till Dawn, Django Unchained - where it's really two movies: first is the quasi-horror-mystery as to what this shark is, which shark ("THIS IS NOT A BOAT ACCIDENT!") and how the politicians - namely the Mayor (who has great hair btw), a spineless weasel who kinda, almost, sorta gets a sympathetic moment in the hospital ("My kids were on that beach too") if it wasn't so pathetic - screw things up. Spielberg, by proxy of a shark machine that didn't work so great, went for what would later become a (over-used?) staple of horror films, especially serial killer flicks, where *we* become the killer in a sense, floating around, looking for victims, and then BAM.
The other movie is an adventure movie where the character hinted at in the first half - Surly Mr. Quint (and really, thanks to Robert Shaw, isn't it one of the two or three most 'something' characters in modern cinema? a "Working-Class Hero" with a lot of layers and demons and a lack of AA sponsorship) - takes center stage as our other heroes, Brody and Hooper, are almost at his mercy, and yet help him and collaborate on this hunt.
And what makes the film is that both films work unto themselves, and yet are all of a piece. In an odd way even though sharks ARE very important to the story - where else would we get the Indianapolis story without em - they could be hunting anything really. I don't mean to marginalize the location, the Orca boat, the sea-bound sense of what has to be done physically on the ship ("Know how to tie a sheep shank?" "You didn't say how short you wanted it." God this movie is quotable), but if they were out like, I don't know, hunting a mountain lion or a big bear, it would still be the same great characters and the same stakes of life-or-death as well as life-or-death for anyone else.
I can't really think of a better man vs nature film, can you? Certainly not any without Murray Hamilton. or John Williams, who made such a score that you could put it on (like other classical Spielberg tracks) a classic-baroque music station on the radio and it'd fit completely in. Matter of fact, it's surprising the shark's theme- 'dun-un (repeat)' doesn't just come out of the shark's mouth!
PS: the Shark was named "Bruce" after Spielberg's lawyer. Guess when you need to take a BITE out of a contract, make sure your teeth are shot-glass sized, eh?