Spielberg's Nautical Masterpiece will have You Biting Your Nails!

Rating: 9/10 (14 April 2015)

Long cited as the movie that changed Hollywood into a sensation- bound blockbuster factory, Jaws continues to be regarded as a high- point of Steven Spielberg's oeuvre - a near Hitchcockian exercise in transference of guilt and making the audience pay for its illicit pleasures.
The setting is almost quaint by today's blockbuster standards. Instead of a faraway fantasy realm or a city sheltered by superheroes, Jaws takes place in the beach-side town of Amity during a blazing hot summer where tourists are out in force. However, the film's opening moments foreshadow the trauma that's to come as a young woman's sandy frolic ends with her gurgled scream as she disappears into an ocean, having fallen prey to the great white. While more bodies turn up on Amity Island, Spielberg milks the slow burn, hiding the shark in his watery depths, instead introducing us to Roy Scheider's protagonist, Police Chief Martin Brody. Despite Brody's protestations, the incidents go largely unreported as the town mayor doesn't want panic to keep the all-important vacationers away. But when an attack is witnessed in broad daylight, mass hysteria takes over and there's no denying the calamity the town faces. Soon, it's left to Brody, ballsy shark- hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) and oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) to head out into the ocean on a heroic expedition and finish off the aquatic beast.
Jaws begins as a sunshine-bright horror movie: ordinary people motivated by greed and pleasure are shaken upon understanding that a murderous uncanny fiend has arrived in their midst. Then it becomes an astounding descendant of nautical tales: rage and obsession unleash a flurry of vehemence. Spielberg expertly conceals the monster (don't listen to the cynics who claim the shark looks iffy now), luring us into a false sense of security before unleashing him into the frame sparingly to create impact jolts. Four decades later it continues to instill fear because Spielberg's direction is so assuredly taut, and is ably bolstered by John Williams' now-iconic, terror-inducing 'da- dumb' score (the alternating two-note motif still signals a shift to the edge of your seat, creating a throbbing sense of menace). Spielberg wants us to be terrified by his film, but he also wants us to be awed and excited and he achieves that with aplomb. Credit is also due for the cast for investing the monster movie premise with such believability. The trio's cracking camaraderie has seldom been bettered and the aquatic terror is deftly balanced with lively, likable characterizations.
Jaws is a marvel of economic storytelling; its formula so hard to capture it's now near-mythical – filmmakers have been chasing it like Ahab chasing Moby Dick ever since. They don't make them like this anymore!