A film that has aged like fine wine

Rating: 10/10 (22 June 2009)

Jaws has been dissected and analyzed perhaps more than any other cinematic work in history. There are several full-length texts that explore this film's every nuance, and countless articles have been written about the film itself, its birthing of the "summer blockbuster", and its impact on motion picture history. With this in mind, I am fully aware that I will not be able to shed any new critical light on this landmark film in a 1000-word IMDb entry. However, since Jaws is indisputably one of the greatest films ever made, and certainly in my all-time Top 10, I felt that I had to write SOMETHING about it.
Few films are perfect. This one absolutely is. Jaws is the rarefied movie that can weather intensive scrutiny of each of its sum parts, and still emerge from this analysis as a clearly superior work in every aspect of its production. The acting is top-notch, and each of its characters are perfectly cast and essayed. The score is superlative, and as key to the horror within as the shark. The story itself is deceptively simple, yet powerful enough to remain both timely and timeless. The camera work and use of environment to create tension are unparalleled in the film medium, and every frame carries an implied menace, even when the shark is nowhere in sight. Every detail of the film-making process is performed here with such groundbreaking precision that the film almost becomes a textbook.
Those familiar with the troublesome shoot that birthed this film know all the anecdotes associated with that process, so we'll skip those here. But it is worth noting that the film is actually better because of each problem encountered during the production, which certainly says a lot about the talented crew that put this together, but says even more about what role fate plays in the creation of true art. This film was supposed to be made exactly as it was, and the series of happy accidents and no-show mechanical monsters that forced the film-makers to turn the ocean into a monster with another monster inside of it ended up changing the possibilities of what a horror film could be, and tapping into each of the most potent fears of mankind simultaneously.
It's also worth mentioning that Jaws is one of the only films ever made that not only surpasses its source work, but renders it relatively useless. Certainly, Peter Benchley's novel is a fantastic read, but no words can essay the endless possibilities for terror the way that the frames of the vast, mysterious ocean do in this film. While Benchley's characters were well-defined and offered layers of depth, the actors here don't play these characters, they BECOME them. The Amity Island in the book is a well-crafted fictional beach city, but the town and its denizens are so magnificently rendered in the film, we could almost be watching a documentary.
But, stripping all that away, Jaws is a monster movie, and on that count it succeeds better than any other film in the genre. The unimaginable horror of being attacked by this monstrous fish and crushed between its titular Jaws conjures up agonies beyond comprehension, and even though we see very little of the shark's capacity for destruction in the film, the glimpses we do get, coupled with our own implicit subconscious knowledge that dying like the victims in this film would probably be about the worst way our lives could end, create a scenario borne straight from nightmares.
In terms of this film's impact, I can only speak personally. The honest truth is that I am terrified to this day of the ocean; so much so that when I go to the beach, the only contact I have with the water is when I walk along the coast and feel it lapping at my feet. Now, I'm not necessarily afraid to go in the water because Jaws is a scary movie, even though it most assuredly is. What frightens me is that there ARE sharks out there in the sprawling blue-green enigma, and some of them DO attack humans, and though I am keenly aware that no one has ever caught a shark as big as Bruce, I am also aware that there are depths of the ocean we have yet to discover, and lifeforms down in these depths that we aren't even aware exist... and they probably swim up closer to the surface from time to time.
Frame by frame, Jaws is quite simply a masterpiece, and considering the impact this piece of celluloid has had on my life to this day, I would have to consider it the most truly scary horror film I have ever seen. Yes, there is levity, and there are moments of peace buried within the razor tension of the film's core struggle of man vs. beast. But, overlying all of this is the inescapable knowledge that somewhere out there, shark's in the water... our shark.