Over the years, I have often heard praise launched at Steven Spielberg's Jaws. And while I knew, on some level, that the praise was warranted, I never really found myself compelled to watch it, especially after watching a few classic films and ultimately feeling disappointed by them. Did I have the heart to tell people, after finally watching Jaws, that their favorite movie was mediocre? With this in mind, I went into Jaws with a neutral perspective. I understood that Spielberg is prolific and responsible for a lot of our favorite movies, but I was going to try and not let that color my opinion of Jaws, for better or for worse. And with the re-release of Jaws this week in IMAX, I thought now was the perfect time to finally dive into the waters of Amity Island.
Based on Peter Benchley's novel of the same name, the story is one we're all familiar with at this point. A man-eating great white shark is terrorizing a small beach town on the East Coast of America at the height of summer and the people must band together to hunt the beast down. Released in 1975, the surprise for me, watching it for the first time in 2022, was how often I was rooting for the shark. It was actually a bit disappointing that the shark did not manage to ominously survive its encounter with the humans at the end of the story.
Knowing something of the history of what went into the shark aspect of Jaws through documentaries like Playing with Sharks, which documented the lives of Valerie Taylor and her husband – two shark fanatics and a couple of the shark experts who advised on Jaws – I had the perspective of someone who knew the after effect of Jaws on the marine community. It shouldn't shock you to know that the shark in Jaws inspired a proverbial war on sharks. The fear that came as a result of the movie lead to near-obsessive hunting of the creatures. This inevitably leads to people advocating for preserving the local wildlife of the oceans (specifically to prevent the overhunting of sharks). All of that is to say, I did not approach the idea of hunting the man-eating shark, however villainous it was, with any sort of warmth. But that also did not take away from the film and still managed to deliver a healthy dose of entertainment.
The Villain of Jaws is Actually Not the Great White Shark
For me, this was not a monster movie that put the shark as a villain stalking the beaches of the New England coast, but rather a story of hubris and ego, and one that spotlights the real villain as, you guessed it, man. After news of a killer shark is revealed to the locals in the town of Amity Island, Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) pushes to close the beaches before the droves of people come in from out of town to enjoy the Fourth of July celebrations. But, unfortunately, being a beach town, Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) protests. They need the summer revenue, so he pushes back on closing the beaches, unconvinced about the shark. He pressures the coroner to change his conclusions and the beaches stay open!
And then, the inevitable happens. A sunny day, a beach full of people, and an apex predator on the prowl spell disaster for Amity Island. With more dead, including a little boy, the hunt for the shark is on. Droves of hunters flow into Amity Island with the intent of killing the shark, not really caring about the effect it will have on the local marine ecosystem or even knowing what type of shark they're hunting. After failing to capture the beast, Brody, oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and a local shark hunter named Quint (Robert Shaw) pursue the great white shark out in the open ocean.
This hunt is where some of the most iconic scenes from the movie come from. As the three men chum the open waters hunting for the shark, the atmosphere completely changes. Now they're in the shark's territory, and they are far out of their depth. John Williams' iconic soundtrack is still as effective as ever in building tension, even if we expect an attack to come. The way the animal turns the tables from being the hunted to the hunter is one of the highlights of the film. In fact, the way that the movie does not hold back on the gruesome nature of the attacks is actually refreshing, considering how often Hollywood is prone to the pan-away from the action move.
Hooper and Quint Are Two Sides of the Same Coin
The story frames Brody as a familiar heroic figure. He is a man of the law, someone who is just trying to protect his town and struggling with the Mayor's bureaucracy and the extremism of both Quint and Hooper. While Quint is a skilled hunter, he states quite early on that his help comes at a hefty price. He is out for profit and he is eager to mount the bones of the great white on his walls next to the carcass of many a dead animal. Combining that with the fact that he was aboard the USS Indianapolis, one of the ships who delivered the nuclear bomb that would attack Hiroshima, it actually felt quite good to see him slowly get consumed by the beast he so brazenly believed he could best.
On the other side of the coin, Hooper's love for oceanography feels less like love for marine wildlife. Instead, it feels like an ambitious move to land himself on a magazine or a scientific journal as the first to capture one of the largest sharks known to man. He risks the lives of the men on the ship trying to capture a photo of the shark. At the end of the day, when all of his intellectualism is stripped away, he and Quint are both trophy hunters and there for the thrill of the hunt, not for any measure of altruism.
Jaws Still Works as a Thriller, But With the Humans as the Antagonists
In the end, for me, Jaws ends more like a tragedy rather than a triumph. Knowing that actual real-life sharks do not attack humans unless they are provoked, Jaws made a sizable impact on the actual environment when it inspired the fears of generations of people who villainized the animals and made them the target of hunters. Even Peter Benchley stated later on that he regretted writing Jaws. The author, who later became a conservationist, said, "Sharks don't target human beings, and they certainly don't hold grudges."
On a macro scale, it demonstrates the effectiveness of Spielberg's storytelling in that he placed that great white shark in the nightmares of countless people. In 2022, with the perspective of time, Jaws still works as the thriller that it is, but perhaps one that frames who is right and who is wrong a bit differently. It is most certainly a story about white men and their battle against nature, with one trying to simply survive the encounter and the other two trying to best it, but as is often the case with man vs nature stories, man's victory over nature tends to age poorly over time. This is the case for Jaws. It felt impossible to root for the humans, though Brody's earnestness offers a strong case because he has no ulterior motives.
As a piece of movie making, without the aid of digital effects, Jaws still stands the test of time. The suspense, the emotion, and the action, it's all there and feels relevant despite being a 47-year-old movie. Targeting an intrinsic instinct of survival from attacks, specifically from the unknown, is something that humanity will always grapple with. It inspires everything from zombie movies to monster stories to outer space adventures. In this way, Jaws remains a classic and is a story that is constantly evolving with time.
Rating: A-
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