Iconic but still less than the sum of its parts

Rating: 8/10 (3 January 2009)

"Jaws" is an iconic American film, as pervasive within its generation as "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", "Star Wars", "The Godfather", or "2001: A Space Odyssey". However, it remains a flawed film.
So, what's good about it that it achieved icon status? The cast could hardly be better with Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw all at the top of their game. John Williams' score is just about perfect. The dialog and pacing are uniformly excellent for a top-notch thriller.
So where does it fall down? First of all, the animatronic shark is somewhat anticlimactic and generally unbelievable. Fortunately, it doesn't get much screen time and what it has doesn't leave the audience too much time to think. And that brings us to the second problem. Spielberg failed to achieve the suspension of disbelief that the film requires. Although the audience doesn't have quite enough time to see the holes in the plot or the shabbiness of the FX, both are lurking in the viewers' collective subconscious.
Everyone should see "Jaws" at some point in their lives, but I can understand those from later generations wondering what the big deal was.