Good scenes
As Brody tries to relax on the beach, but yet keeping a watchful eye on the sea, sure that he is right and there is danger out there, he sees what looks at first like the tip of a shark fin break the water near a swimmer lounging on a lilo, but it turns out just to be the head of another swimmer. Again, while he's talking to someone else, a scream rings out and he jumps up, but it's just a girl and her man playing in the water. Finally, a boy searches for his dog, who was swimming in the water, but all we see now is the piece of wood he had in his mouth. And then, the music begins...
Brody is incensed that his son is sitting in a boat at the jetty, worried for him. His wife laughs at his fear, until she happens to look at the book he has been reading, which shows a drawing of what I suppose is meant to be a shark but looks like a cross between a pike and a piranha attacking a boat. Suddenly she yells to her son to get the hell out of the boat. She realises that even being this close to the water could be hazardous, and that her husband is not being overprotective.
In perhaps what could be seen as true entrepreneurial spirit, and grasping an opportunity, some enterprising arcade owner has hired a game called
Killer Shark!
At one point, as everyone lounges on the beach, but nobody dares go into the water, the mayor convinces one family he knows to take the first step. They must feel like he's serving them up for dinner!
The idea of the kids using a boat with a shark fin stuck on the underside to pretend to be a shark has been parodied over and over by now (“AAAHH! Sharkboy!”) but here it's used well, both to lighten the mood and also lull the viewer into a false sense of security, so that when the shark does attack, we're never quite sure initially if it's just those kids horsing around again. Until it's too late, of course. It also leads to Brody reacting with world-weariness to the shout of alarm, rather than rushing to the scene as he would normally do; the hoax has skewed his mindset, and it's a case of “What now?” rather than “Jesus Christ!”
Having drunk a can of beer, Quint squeezes his fist on it and crushes it. Staring eye to eye with him, Hooper drains the paper cup of water he has in his hand and then crushes it!
After Quint has sneered at his college education, Hooper gives him the time-honoured “fu
ck you” signal, though he is careful to wait until the man's back is turned!
And then of course, there's the scene where Brody is throwing the chum out into the sea and we catch our first real proper look at the shark. Seen first time, it's pretty terrifying when you realise how big it is, and how evil those teeth are, not to mention how close the chief comes to just being dragged overboard!
The following scene, where Hooper tries to convince Brody to get out on the prow of the boat, so that he can “get some scale” and see how big the shark actually is, is hilarious and not unsurprisingly Hooper gets told where to go by Brody.
As the guys are comparing scars, Hooper giving Quint as good as he gets, Brody looks at his own stomach and sort of sighs, the definite impression being given that he feels left out, not having any scars to show. Talk about testosterone!
WTF??
Directly after the scene in which two fishermen try, unsuccessfully, to catch the shark (one of them coming close to being eaten) there is a scene the next morning where a guy walks out of the post office, a pipe in his mouth, smiling. He stands, right in front of the camera, smiles, says nothing, then turns and leaves. He's never seen again. WTF was all that about? Is he someone famous? He acts like he's playing to the camera, and maybe he is, but why, if he's just an extra, do they focus on him as if he were someone important? I don't get it.
I suppose it can't ever be said to have been deliberate, or arranged, but rather serendipitously, as the shark attacks and they prepare to defend the boat, what looks like an actual shooting star falls from the sky, visible just over Brody's left shoulder at about 1:32:10 on the DVD. An omen of success, or doom? Amazing.
Notes on cinematography
I can't say for certain but I feel relatively confident in saying that this was the first shark movie to show the action from below; in the very first scene, as the girl enters the water at night and begins swimming, we see as it were from under the water, her body just a dark outline, as if something deep below was watching her, and alerting us to the danger lurking nearby. Shark movies good and bad would use this perspective for decades to come – and still do – giving us the idea of seeing things from the perspective of the shark. I believe this was something of a game changer, turning the shark from a shadowy mindless monster into (falsely I guess) a calculating killer, awaiting the chance to take its prey.
Also, not so much cinematography (though there is that) but more a case of really clever direction, the fact that the girl in the water is screaming at the top of her lungs, fighting for her life while the boy she was supposed to be swimming with sits on the shore, totally oblivious to her plight, gives a great sense of how difficult it can be to be heard, never mind saved, when only a few hundred feet away from the shoreline. You might as well be on your own. We're screaming “Help her! Can't you hear her?” but when the scene switches back to the shoreline, all is quiet and calm, so you can understand how the hapless guy has no clue what's going on. Great juxtapositioning, I feel.
Also a point on gore, while we're here. Despite what I thought at the time (prior to seeing the movie, which wasn't until well into the eighties if not later)
Jaws is not at all a gory movie. Given how visceral later ones became, focussing on the horror and the blood and the best way to show a body torn in two (I'm looking, so far, at
you,
Bait!) this movie dealt more in suspense and suggestion, the archetypal footstep behind you in the dark, the sudden movement in the shadows, as opposed to the madman with a chainsaw rearranging your anatomy in the most graphic way possible. Even the initial attack is handled without any blood (it takes place at night, of course, so it's very dark) and all you really see is the girl being dragged underwater and screaming. For a very long time in the movie you don't even see the shark: it is a bogeyman, a figure of fear and terror, glimpsed if at all as only a fin until the climax of the movie, which makes the actual revelation all the more effective and scary.
Music
You can't of course fault John Williams's score; it's become legendary now, even to the point of having been used in the World Cup in 1994 as a joke when players got injured and had to be removed from the pitch (worked once or twice, became very annoying after that: not sure if it was a spontaneous thing originally, but when you consider there are thirty-two teams and the thing runs for a month, well, you can see how the joke would wear thin really fast, but then, that's the Americans for you: flog a thing to death) and it has taken its place in movie soundtrack lore. However I do notice that the theme used in the scene where the fishermen think they are catching the shark and are in fact pulled into the water as the chain they attached to the bait holds, but the jetty does not, is very reminiscent of Alexander Courage's incidental music to much of
Star Trek (the original series), especially any fight scenes.
What I do love though is that the music is used very sparingly. In fact, for much of the movie there is no music. The theme only plays when the shark is approaching, and even when we first see it, as it rises out of the water as Brody throws the meat overboard, there
is no music. No sudden blast of chords, no mad violin skirling, no guitar riff or orchestral punch. Nothing. It's almost, musically, a non-event, and a fantastic example of how you don't always need to underline a scary or climactic scene with a fanfare of music. Restraint
par excellence, musically.
The music, as they face off against the shark in the climax, is disarmingly upbeat and almost carefree – you know the kind of thing, that sort of music they play for the funnier scenes in Westerns, adventure music rather than danger music. It's very clever, as it gives you the idea that the guys have all this in hand now; it's just a matter of time before they kill the shark, go home to a hero's welcome. But it doesn't work out that way, and in fact once it becomes apparent that the shark is still in control, the music stops completely.
Even when the shark is killed, as its exploded corpse sinks slowly into the sea, down to the seabed, the music Williams chooses to use is not a triumphant fanfare or march, but a gentle, rippling, underwater anthem, almost peaceful. You can even get the impression from the music that the death of the shark, though necessary in a kill-or-be-killed way, is something of a loss and a tragedy. Though the movie says otherwise, the music mourns the death of the huge leviathan.
Fact vs Fiction
It's hard to say. There are some facts here that hold up, but much of what's said is pure nonsense. Sharks aren't remorseless eating machines, indifferent to what they consume, In fact, just the opposite: they are quite picky eaters. I also doubt one would venture so close to the shore, especially with so many swimmers in the water. Sharks are attracted to the seal-like movements of swimmers, yes, but a large number of them I think would scare a shark off. Also, the water would be too shallow, and as for one attacking in a pond? I'm not so sure about the intelligence of a shark, as in, would it know to knock over a boat and to charge a cage? Well, probably the latter, maybe the former too, but I think the writer here made the mistake of trying to make the shark too intelligent, make it almost human, which in itself made it less believable. I can see a shark fighting to survive, but revenge? I don't see a shark bothering about that. When it had the chance to escape, I think it would have done.
It's odd that I read in the credits that both
National Geographic and a marine institute were involved, presumably as consultants, and yet some totally glaring errors and outright lies, if not guesses (and certainly not educated ones) fail to have been pointed out. Of course, how much input these institutions had to the film, and how much control was exerted over the screenplay by the writers and the studio I don't know. I can imagine some scientist saying “But that's not right” and a studio executive rolling their eyes and saying “It's just a film. Nobody will know or care.”
But for all the actual research done into sharks, of which I see very little in the movie, I'd have to go with an overall
Veridct
What other could there be? This is the archetypal shark movie, and even notwithstanding the glaring errors in factual details about sharks, the almost cobbled-together mythology that grew up around them after this movie and the damage it did, if unwittingly, to the species, it's almost perfect. The pacing is excellent: moments of drama contrast with the odd light-hearted moment and then spiral quickly back to drama. There's action but it's not just an action movie; in fact, for much of the time it's more a tale of one man's determination to beat bureaucratic regulations and do the right thing. The writer successfully avoided throwing in a love interest – though Brody is married and we see his wife she's a completely peripheral character, and the movie would not suffer without her – and there are no real subplots. A lesser man might have written in a heart-rending decision for Brody, making him choose between his wife, who declares the island unsafe and vows to return to New York (as she hints at weakly, just the once) leaving him to make the decision as to whether he went with her (and the children) or remained to safeguard the beach and the people he is sworn to defend. Maybe that happens in the book – I did read it but it was decades ago and I can't remember.
It's certainly a guy movie. Apart from the – as already mentioned, totally peripheral – wife of the police chief and the odd character here and there, there are no women in this. It's three guys, three macho men heading out to hunt down a big fish. It could have been a total testosterone fest, but they avoided that, just, by making Hooper the college boy, though Quint is every inch Stallone or Schwarzenegger on the sea. The shots of the shark are not overused and are held back until the big reveal, and even then only really come into their own for the climax of the movie, and as I mentioned earlier there's no real reliance on the gore aspect of things. The juxtapositioning of the laughing swapping of stories about scars turning deadly serious with Quint's relating of the tale of the USS Indianapolis (as featured in our previous movie) is really well handled, and serves to stop the moment becoming
too light-hearted, reminding us that the guys are stalking a killer out here, a killer than can easily claim all their lives.
Quint's death, too, adds realism to the movie for me. I probably would have preferred if Hooper had died too, but you can't have everything. But having at least one of the “three amigos” not make it back, and that one being the one who has hunted sharks all his life, is perhaps symbolic. The man who confesses he loves sharks, and the one who knows very little about them, and could care less, survive, while the one who has been their natural enemy all his life (perhaps due to the Indianapolis incident) and who has made money by killing them, ends up, Ahab-like, as the victim of the very creature he went to sea to hunt.
It really couldn't be any better, from the glaring refusal of the mayor to see what is in front of him, worried about his own prestige and bad press, and not thinking about the consequences for his people to the failed attempt to inject the shark and the seeming loss of Hooper to e,
Jaws is pretty damn near perfect. Now, if only we hadn't all believed it was based on facts...
Nevertheless, I have no hesitation in awarding it, as you would probably expect, the highest possible rating.
