Exploiting the Ultimate Fear

Rating: 9/10 (21 November 2003)

Jaws exploits the most primal fear that any creature can have: sudden, excruciating, inescapable death by a creature that sees one as nothing more than meat. We think that we are at the apex of the food chain, a creature that most others fear. Even the dog, the animal that most intimately knows us and our vulnerabilities recognizes us as a better food source alive than dead -- but woe is it to something that threatens that food source! Think of the Dobermans in "The Boys From Brazil" who dispatch a nazi war criminal in a particularly well-deserved manner.
The people that "Jaws" kills aren't so guilty. They just happen to meet a very large, hungry, rogue shark -- the sort that sees humans in the water as meat. The tables are turned, and Man is deposed from what his throne as the biggest, baddest predator since T-Rex. If that isn't scary, then what is?
This is a very gory movie. The closest parallel is Hitchcock's "Psycho" in which a crazy man becomes an animalistic killer, someone out of control of his impulses, who must kill because it is his nature. "Jaws" has more explicit killing, with human body parts left behind and great amounts of blood. The setting is so much different from the dry land of Arizona and the Central Valley of California that one cannot see a ripoff of Hitchcock. Like "Psycho" this is a relatively low-budget film -- but just as Hitchcock did with "Psycho", Spielberg did everything right.
This movie is not for the faint of heart. Neither are the crude ripoffs involving tigers, killer whales, octopuses(?), piranhas, snakes, bears, and crocodilians. The ripoffs are simply cheesy flicks that would have been best unmade. This is the original and the unsurpassable best as a movie whose basis is the primal fear of becoming dinner for a big predator.
Biological impropriety knocks off a "1" on my rating... to a "9". "Psycho" gets a "10".