still thrilling after all these years

Rating: Null/10 (14 March 2002)

Not many films have the power to keep me in suspense everytime I watch them. JAWS is one of the few that does. I've seen it countless times, and I still find myself captured by the suspenseful each time. A terrific lead cast (Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfus, Robert Shaw) highlight Spielberg's intense ride of a great white shark menacing a small East Coast island community during the Fourth of July holiday. Spielberg does a great job of capturing the small town island life before moving things to the claustrophobic setting of a lone ship at sea. Thanks to on-set mechanical problems, "Bruce" the shark (as he was called during filming, named after Spielberg's lawyer at the time) is kept hidden from the audience for much of the movie, making his first appearance in the film a moment that shocks not only Scheider's police chief Brody, but the audience as well.
The interplay between the three lead stars is what makes the film interesting, though we end up not really knowing a whole lot about Brody and Dreyfus's Matt Hooper. Shaw's Quint, by far, delivers the most intriguing backstory, telling the two men about his time on the U.S.S. Indianapolis, a story that is both exciting and (thanks to John Williams' music) haunting at the same time. The scenes in which the men are attempting to capture the shark are exciting and suspenseful, culminating in the final attack that sees Brody as the only one left to take care of things, and he does so in a truely ingenious way.
Through the whole film we're drawn in by these characters and come to connect with them. We care about what happens to them, and that's what a good movie should do. Along with RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, this is my favorite Spielberg movie that I still consider one of his absolute best. And knowing all the problems they encountered in getting it made, it's really a miracle that it turned out as fantastic as it did.