You're gonna need a bigger boat

Rating: 10/10 (1 November 2002)

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** (spoilers) When Steven Spielberg was only 27 years old, a young-and-coming director, he read Peter Benchley's best-selling novel, JAWS. He read it over and over again, and finally came to the conclusion that a good movie could be made about this suspenseful book.
The words "Good movie" in that sentence could be the understatement of the decade. Spielberg's 1975 suspense thriller, JAWS, is respected as one of the best movies of its genre ever to be made. It boasts a great cast, with Roy Scheider as Amity Police Chief Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper, a young ichthyologist who comes to help out Amity with the shark problems it has, and Robert Shaw as Quint, a crazy old sailor who has been in one battle too many. Lorraine Gary co-stars as Brody's worrier wife Ellen, and Murray Hamilton as Amity's mayor who seems to care more about the economy of the summer resort more than the safety of the citizens.
JAWS starts out simple enough. A young woman is killed in the water one morning, and Chief Brody reluctantly accepts Mayor Larry Vaughn's decision to keep the beaches open. But then the tables turn on him. When there is another attack, drastic measures are taken as the beaches are reluctantly closed by Vaughn, and many fisherman are sent to kill the shark. The fisherman do catch a man-eating tiger shark, but Matt Hooper declares that it is not the shark and proves it when he and Brody do an autopsy and find no remains of the second victim, who would still be in the shark's stomach even after a day or so. When Hooper finds a great white shark tooth in the hull of a wrecked fishing boat (then drops it when he finds something else in the hull of the boat), he declares that a Great White Shark is living off the shore of Amity Island. Mayor Vaughn won't hear of it, however, and states that the beaches will be open for the fourth of July. When there is yet another attack, Brody decides to take matters into his own hands and pay a fisherman named Quint $10,000 to catch and kill the shark. Quint decides to take Brody and Hooper along for the ride.
Then comes the second half of JAWS, which takes place entirely on Quint's vessel, the ORCA. When a feeble attempt at catching the shark on hook and line fails, Quint decides to take on a different tactic. When he sees that the shark is 25 feet long and over 6,000 pounds, he decides to stick a barrel in the shark to wear him down and bring him to the surface. After one barrel, though, the shark goes under the water, and the three-man crew settle down for dinner.
The next scene includes one of the longest, most memorable speeches in movie history, as Quint tells Brody and Hooper about his days on the U.S.S Indianapolis. He decribes that 1,100 soliders went into the water, but only 316 came out, as the rest either drowned or were killed by sharks, and he the crew were only rescued sfter five long days of waiting in the water. The speech tells the audience how Quint became a crazy old fisherman and why he hunts sharks for a living.
After Quint's speech, the shark attacks the ORCA, which leads to the engines being slightly damaged, lights going out, and water getting everywhere. The next morning, Quint and Hooper see that the barrel is up, and try to snag it, but then the shark runs away as Brody tries to make a distress phone call to the Coast Guard. Quint stops him, however, and he then puts another two barrels into the shark. When the barrels surface, the shark gets revenge by filling the ORCA's engines even more with salt water, though Quint manages to get a third barrel into it. But as the ORCA starts to sink, everything seems hopeless.
However, Hooper propses a strategy to Quint; getting into his "anti-shark cage" and trying to stab the shark with a poisonous pole in the water. To Hooper's dismay, however, he loses the pole and flees from the cage for his life as the shark rips it apart.
As the shark surfaces and sinks the stern of the ORCA, Quint accidently slides down the deck and is bitten in half in a horrifying scene that shows the shark coming back to finish the job from his Indianapolis days thirty years eariler.
The only person left to possibly be able to fight the shark is Brody, who is able to throw one of Hooper's "explodable" oxygen tanks into the shark's mouth, then grab Quint's M-1 rifle and take shots at the shark's mouth from the mast, trying to hit the tank. On his sixth shot, he penetrates the steel tank and blows up the shark in a scene that many people in theaters cheered on. When Hooper surfaces, he and Brody kick their way toward Amity and safely arrive, with the shark dead.
It's a great story, and was also very powerfully acted. Shaw, who actually also wrote the Indianapolis speech, was easily the best actor in the movie, and I think he should have won Best Actor even over the likes of Jack Nicholson in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. Not to be counted out, Scheider filled in the slot of Chief Brody admirably, and the final scene where he kills the shark is amazing.
I did find two flaws in JAWS, however. First off is the big one: the shark itself. Spielberg did a great job to edit out most of the scenes with the shark in it, but there were still some scenes that showed the shark as not being very good. It actually kind of looks like it's made out of rubber, and I'm not kidding. In the scene where it launches itself onto the stern of the ORCA, it looks like one of those bathtub sharks that a 3-year-old plays with, so I think the shark could have been better, even though it was only 1975, and they didn't have great special effects back then.
The last flaw isn't nearly as big, and only really bad movie critics would point it out, but I thought I had to anyway. When Brody kills the shark, he shoots an oxygen tank that is lodged in its mouth, and it explodes. That isn't very realistic-though if that situation really did occur, shooting the tank MIGHT kill the shark anyway. But there wouldn't be an explosion. Quoting Spielberg, "People have believed what I've done for the past two hours. I think they'll believe what I'll show them in the last five minutes".
Despite these minor flaws, JAWS was a great movie, easily one of the best of the 1970s, and it deserves to be recognized as it is today. Oh, and as for the Oscars: ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST was good and all, but give JAWS a break; it deserved at least one of the five major Oscar Awards.