Video Game Corner: Jaws Unleashed (2006)

Seems like a pretty fun concept for a game, doesn't it? Getting to play as the gigantic, man-eating great white shark in Jaws and stalking the ocean around Amity Island, attacking anyone and anything that gets in your way, destroying boats and eating animals and people alike. It sounds like a fun game. When I saw this game at a store one day, I couldn't believe it. I'd heard that there was a Jaws game being developed but I expected it to be a game where you'd play Brody and try to kill the shark. When I realized that you play the shark, I knew I had to play this. Eventually, I got a Playstation 2 (which I didn't have until Christmas of 2006) and a few games, this being one of them. When I finally played the game, it was fun being the shark... at first. But then, as you go through the various missions and spend your time attacking people, it loses its luster fairly quick. I eventually stopped because I was getting confused on one level but I recently went back and finished it and I can now say, without a shadow of a doubt, that this game isn't very good.

The storyline for the game is that Amity Island is expanding in its economy by making connections with wealthy corporations who are building industrial factories like drilling platforms, underwater facilities and the like in and around the island. With the Fourth of July coming up, the amount of tourists on the island is swelling as well. However, all this activity attracts an enormous great white shark (i.e. you) to the island as well. As you progress through the stages of the game and cause more havoc throughout the island, the cutscenes create a familiar scenario: local biologist Michael Brody (who acts more like Matt Hooper than any relative of Roy Scheider's character) continually tries to warn the greedy mayor that opening the beaches with the shark prowling around would be disastrous but he refuses to listen to him at every turn, providing more cannon fodder for you to kill and destroy.

After the opening tutorial and first real level, the game's layout becomes similar to the Grand Theft Auto games: you have a free-roaming mode where you can simply swim around Amity Island, attacking people, animals, and watercraft at your whim. You use the map-screen to see where your next mission is located and you can swim there whenever you're ready to do so. The shark (which is actually called "Jaws") has a menu of upgrades that you can access from both the main menu and Pause screen. In order to buy upgrades, you have to earn points by completing missions, destroying boats and eating people in either mode of play, collecting bonus items, or completing the many side-missions strewn throughout the free-roaming mode. You can upgrade five different aspects of the shark: power (the amount of damage you can cause when attacking), speed, hunger (how long you can go without food), accuracy, and health. There are save points throughout the free-roaming level that you can use to save the upgrades that you acquire. Besides your standard health meter, you also have a hunger meter. When your hunger meter starts to go down, that means you have to eat something because your health will start diminish. Naturally, your health also diminishes whenever you take damage. You have a variety of attacks: biting (of course), ramming things with your snout, and a tail whip. You also have a stealth attack that I was never able to pull off properly, mainly because I don't think the game instructed me well on how to pull it off. As you get more upgrades, you can acquire more attacks like a "corkscrew" charge where you spin while charging and the body-bomb, where you leap out of the water at a boat and do a body slam (I've never been able to pull this off successfully).

As I said, the game is fun at first but after a while, the repetitive nature sets in. There are only so many times you can swim around Amity in the free-roaming stage and attack all the swimmers, water-skiers, sea animals, boats and so on before it gets old fast. The missions aren't much better. I'll go into greater detail about them shortly but for the most part, they're either repetitive, ridiculously easy, or cruelly hard. As for the side-missions, I've only done a few because they're not fun and the game is overly snippy about how you must do them. One that was fun to do was a mission where a helicopter is trying to rescue some drowning swimmers and your task is to destroy it before it can do so. This was well done and referenced back to a scene in Jaws 2 where the shark destroys a helicopter trying to rescue the trapped teenagers. Other than that, the side-missions were nothing special and were mainly lame mini-games. If you didn't know where you were allowed to go and where you weren't, you could easily swim outside the "playing range" of the mission, ending it. Other missions sometimes didn't specify where you were supposed to go to do what you needed. One mission involved you having to kill a water-skier before he could complete a jump. I didn't see any water-skier anywhere around and suddenly a message saying that I failed the mission because the skier made the jump came up. Maybe if you'd shown me where I was supposed to go, I wouldn't have failed! There were also three levels to each side-mission but they were just varying degrees of difficulty for the same challenge.

The game also has its share of control, camera, and graphic problems. You have to hold down a button in order to swim but there were plenty of points in the game where I would be moving and would stop to look around but when I would push the button, the shark wouldn't move and I would have to press the button again for some reason. This would become really annoying in boss battles or levels where there were a lot of enemies and would often get me killed. It was also very easy to get stuck, either between to objects or just when I brushed up against one object in particular for some reason. There was one instance where I got stuck in a weird limbo sort of position and I eventually had to reset from my last save point because I couldn't fix the problem. In some stages, the sonar on your HUD would prove to be not as useful as it should be. Your objective is always marked by a red circle on the sonar and points of interest, like items that could help you in a battle, were green blocks. You'd think to get to where you needed to go, you would just until the marker on the sonar that indicated you would reach the aforementioned object right? Normally, this is the case but the sonar doesn't tell you everything. For one, in areas where there long drops downward that you had to swim or where the surface is very high above you, you have no way of knowing if the object is up near the top or below you. Your marker on the sonar could be right on top of the objective but you still wouldn't know if you need to go up or down. It's also frustrating in levels where you're swimming through a series of tunnels and you're going by the sonar when you hit a wall that's not indicated at all on the sonar and you have to go around it. Bottom line, a map layout would have been a lot more helpful.

The camera is really annoying as well. The transitions between above and below the surface of the water are the worst. There were so many times when I dove under the surface but it took the camera far longer than necessary to follow me. Also, the camera would often switch to above the surface when I didn't want it to. There were many times where I would get very close to the surface but not entirely break it and yet the camera would suddenly go above it. This is not something I needed when I was trying to turn around and face something that was attacking me. Speaking of turning, the camera often gets in bad spots off to the side of the shark instead of being directly behind it, making it difficult to see what I'm turning to face. There's a button you can press to make the camera go directly behind you but it often doesn't stay that way, causing you to be constantly battling it. You also turn really slow, leaving you open to attack. The graphics are constantly glitching up. The frame-rate sometimes gets really slow, objects glitch on and off the screen when they shouldn't, and when doing the jumps out of the water to attack ships, the camera would suddenly go crazy and get stuck in weird positions. So, yeah, this game is bugged up the ass. I've heard that the PC version didn't have as many glitches though.

Your health bar is a joke. It's fairly long and you can upgrade it to bigger sizes but the problem is that it's way too easy to lose a lot of health very quickly. The health goes down rather quickly, even when the attack shouldn't have damaged you that much, and there are some enemies that attack you so quickly that you sometimes can't see them. Also, enemies that shouldn't be that much of a threat like people on boats shooting at you or various sea creatures like dolphins and smaller sharks can drain your health so quickly that it's incredibly frustrating. In the first mission of the game, there's a moment where you come across a bunch of piranhas and these little bastards can drain your health so quickly that it's almost like instant death. Animals like dolphins can kill you very easily too. This is ridiculous! I'm a huge great white shark and freaking dolphins and seals are killing me? I wasn't going to kill these animals when I first started playing but when they kept killing, I just said "To hell with it" and slaughtered them. That's another thing: eating and restoring health is a lot more difficult than it should be.You have to grab something, hold the button, and then shake the control stick back and forth to shred it apart to kill it and eat it. Chewing it by pressing the "bite" button doesn't work that well and when holding a victim in its mouth, the shark will sometimes let it go for no reason. It sometimes feels like you can't kill and eat things fast enough to make up for the damage you're taking. Killing divers is the worst because you usually have to bite and shake them two to three times to kill them and when they don't die, they keep shooting harpoons at you, depleting what health you got back. It may sound like I'm being too nitpicky but this game really does have a lot of frustrating problems.

Besides your sonar, you can also switch over to "shark vision", a mode where all enemies and special objects glow so you can see them better. You can also lock onto enemies in order to focus on killing one in particular at a time. But, like a lot of aspects of this game, this doesn't work nearly as well the game would like you to think it does. While you can lock onto a specific enemy, locking onto the one you want to is really difficult because there are times where you'll try to lock onto one right in front of you and the shark vision will target one that's fifteen to twenty-feet away. Also, the ways you're expected to use the shark vision is preposterous and no rational person would ever think to use it in this way. The shark vision not only highlights food but also specific objects that can aid you in your missions. For instance, there's a mission that begins with you in front of an underwater minefield and your shark vision which mines you can destroy without setting off the whole field which results in instant death. However, since I'm playing a shark and not Superman, I didn't think to turn on my shark vision because sharks don't have X-ray vision and, logically, can't see the difference between a dangerous mine and a not so dangerous mine. I know this is a game but that leap in logic is something no one in their right mind would think to do unless they read a walkthrough ahead of time or something.

The graphics and AI of the human characters are really flawed as well. There are some major cutscenes that look decent but the majority of them have really bad character animation with no facial expressions and hardly any body movements whatsoever. (The voice acting is also pretty bad.) The main story of the game features characters that try to tie it to the movies, like having a character named Michael Brody, who, as I said, is more like a substitute for Hooper than Roy Scheider and there's even a shark hunter who's a blatant ripoff of Quint (his fishing boat is named the Orca II for God's sake). There's also a character named Shaw (no explanation needed). While it's cool that they tried to make a connection to the films, the laughable acting, bad character animation, and ridiculous nature of some of the missions make it feel like a mockery than a tribute. Also, the human characters that you can actually attack just say the same stuff over and over again, usually, "Never going to make it!" or "Where is it?!" or simply, "Shark!" It gets old very quick, like everything else in this game.

The music in the game is pretty bad too. The main theme is an uninspired version of the legendary shark theme and there are bits and pieces of John Williams' score strewn throughout the game as well. While it is close to swim and attack people to that awesome music, the bits are really brief and most of the music is generic and unoriginal. The music that plays during the free-roaming level whenever you attack is particularly uninspired. Since this game is backed by Universal, I don't see why they couldn't have just used the majority of the scores from the movies but whatever.

Before we get to the missions, one more general aspect of the game I have to comment on is the bonus items. These come in the form of license plates or tin-cans you see sitting in random parts of both types of levels which give you points to get upgrades. Fair enough. However, what's really dumb is what you get if you acquire them all. I can't remember which one it is but if you get either all the license plates or tin-cans, you win a selection of clips from the movie Jaws. Um, yeah, that's not incentive for me to bust my butt to collect all of these things. Why? Because Jaws is a really famous movie that you can easily get and if I want to watch the movie, I'll just watch the movie! That's why it always annoys me when movie-licensed games feature clips from the movie they're based on but making said movie clips a special feature they expect you to torture yourself trying to unlock is just redundant.

Now for the missions. I'll go through each one and talk about particularly interesting or frustrating aspects of them (most will be the latter). Before we begin, let me just say that some aspects of these missions are really stupid to put in a Jaws game. Some objectives feel more appropriate for a James Bond game and I feel really stupid trying to do this stuff as a shark.

The Break Out: This first stage is a lot like Jaws 3: you're captured and put on display in a high-tech SeaWorld style amusement park and your objective is to escape. Right off the bat, they prove my point about having dumb objectives that don't feel appropriate for this type of game. Your first objective is to grab a scientist, hold him in your mouth, bring him over to a card-reader next to the water and doing so activates the underwater gate you need to swim out of. See what I mean? I'm a shark and I have to use a scientist's ID card to get out of my holding tank. Even during my first time playing, I was thinking, "This is ridiculous." The third section is where you run into this school of piranhas that can kill you too easily. That is so frustrating because you have to charge a jammed door in order to get to the next part of the level but the piranhas won't leave you alone long enough to do so and you have swim away from them or they'll kill you. Once again, I'm a big shark and a bunch of piranhas are able to kill me. Really stupid. In the last section, you fight a killer whale. This fight is very underwhelming because all he does is swim clockwise around the tank without changing direction once and all you have to do is either charge or bite him and keep doing so until he's dead. Don't let him get behind you, though, or you're in for it. Really dull first boss battle.

Dead of Night: The objective here is to destroy a refinery that's polluting the water. First you have to get past an electrified fence by chomping the batteries that are on either side of it. Because of the controls, I would always accidentally touch the fence and set off the alarm. It didn't result in failing the mission but it did make things a little more difficult. After getting through the fence and eating some swimmers to advance to the next section, you have to avoid these searchlights or you get shot. You can destroy a dock where a sniper is standing but I had search a hard time doing that for some reason because I kept getting killed. I don't know if it was by him or someone else but it was frustrating. The last part of the mission is grabbing these explosive barrels people are dumping in the water and spitting them at a certain pipe in order to destroy it. Other than people shooting at me, I never found it that difficult to spit a barrel at the mouth of the pipe and destroy it utterly.

Hunted: This is basically a rehash of the previous mission. You have to remove batteries (three this time), avoid spotlights, and, once again, your main objective is to destroy something by spitting explosive barrels at it. Did the game designers just get lazy and decide to redo the previous level, only beef it up in terms of busywork? Anyway, there are a bunch of mini-sub-like things here that will plague you throughout the rest of the game. They are so annoying with how they shoot torpedoes at you, constantly killing you just when you're about the complete your objective. There were so many times when I was about to spit a barrel at the large tank you're supposed to destroy when I would suddenly die because I got hit by a torpedo. Of course, you can destroy these crafts all you want but they'll still respawn. Also in the first section are a bunch of boats patrolling the surface with dragging nets that you have to be careful not to get caught in. I don't know if it results in instant death or not because I never got caught but I imagine you want to avoid those nets as best as you can. Not a hard level overall but really annoying.

Predator in the Bay: This is where I began to get fed up with the game's difficulty and glitches. First, you have to destroy two diving cages and eat the divers. I've already told you what they do if you don't kill them right away but that's the least of your worries here. After dealing with them, you have to destroy three oil platforms but before you can do that, you have to destroy four turrets on each platform. This is where your shark vision comes in handy because still active turrets have spotlights shimmering through the water when you active the vision. After doing so, you have to go back to the sunken submarine where the diving cages were, grab a torpedo from a pile on the ocean floor, swim back to the oil rig, and hit two of its pillars with the torpedoes in order to destroy it. You have to repeat this process for the other two but that's not the annoying part. There are a bunch of dolphins here that will attack you the minute they see you and I got killed so many times by these little assholes just when I was about to complete this section!

The second part of this level has you swim into another section of the area and into the main power supply of the facility controlling the oil platforms. Once inside, you have to destroy two pillars while avoiding this big fan in the middle of the room (which is really difficult because the thing keeps sucking you towards it and you're constantly fighting the controls). Once you have done so, you have to go back out the way you came and this is where I ran into an annoying glitch. Just as I got out, I died due to a low health bar and a lack of food but getting out triggered the next cutscene. After that, I figured I had to go back in this room and repeat the process since I died but I found that the door to the room wouldn't open when I smashed the bars. Not only that but you're supposed to fight a boss in the last part of the level but it wouldn't show up because I guess the game got confused when my death screen and the next cutscene came up one after the other and didn't know what to do. I had no choice but to reload my last checkpoint and try the whole mission over again. That about tore it for me but I decided to persevere so I could at least say I beat the game.

Fighting the boss was difficult for me but not for the usual reason. The boss is an enormous boat that movies into the harbor. You can attack it with your ramming and biting but it would take forever so the best course of action is to use those torpedoes again and this is where the problem started. When I was destroying the oil rigs, I could get as close to the rig as I wanted in order to shoot the torpedoes but during this fight, I had to stay away from the boat otherwise the explosion from the torpedo would kill me instantly. Trying to line up a shot while staying a safe distance was hard enough but the constantly moving boat just made it even harder and the lack of consistency in how close you could get to an object with a torpedo was annoying. (And those dolphins once again plagued me to no end here!)

The Angry Armada: There's nothing to this level except destroying a bunch of boats that are trying to kill you. Destroying the boats isn't that difficult but they're once again dragging nets so you have to be careful. Here, I did get caught in the nets a few times and you have to rock the control stick back and forth to escape, draining your health before you could do so. There are plenty of animals to eat in order to regain your health and this section wasn't too hard. The boss, a big coastguard ship, was a little more difficult. First off, those little mini-sub things show up again and constantly blast you with torpedoes, often killing you just as you're about to succeed. The way to destroy the boss is to grab the orange mines it drops that don't explode and throw them back at it. The difficult part is that it takes a lot of hits to destroy the boss (sometimes its health bar doesn't go down even when you score a direct hit) and the mines you can use are strewn so far from each other that you often get killed while trying to grab them.

A Taste for Blood: This level is divide into two sections, one being very frustrating and the other being enjoyable. The first section involves you having to navigate through an underwater minefield, destroying certain mines that won't set off the entire field  that you can see by using your shark vision. You have to destroy these mines by spitting barrels at them but staying a reasonable distance from them so as not to take damage from the explosion. The barrels have a tendency to either fly right over the mine (sometimes hitting another mine in the background, setting off the whole field and killing you instantly) or almost get to it but then hang above it for some reason and explode when it feels like it, usually when you've gone to get another barrel because you think you've messed up. To make matters even worse, swimming through the gaps without touching the other mines is so hard. I swear the entire field went off at points when I was sure that I didn't touch a mine. Also, no matter how careful you are, you're going to take damage and getting food is a problem because these seals that swim around will often lead you into the mines when you try to bite them. Also, killing one often results in its brethren attacking you and you're defenseless because you can't move around much due to the cramped quarters. (One last note: the cutscene before this level involves a drunk idiot getting himself blown up and the first thing you hear is him laughing like an idiot. This game is good enough to allow you to skip cutscenes but I got killed so often that I heard this moron's drunk laughter so many times that I about went nuts.)

Now, the second section of this level is quite enjoyable. It involves you hunting down four injured divers whose blood trails you followed into this little cove. Finding their hiding spots and getting to them is actually quite rewarding and makes you wish the game had more levels like this (in fact, this is what the majority of the game should have been instead of these dumb 007-style missions). One diver takes refuge on a piece of floating debris and you simply have to destroy it and eat him. The trickiest one is hiding in a sunken that has two cracks on either side of it. Approaching him and biting scares him from one side to the other and you have to quickly swim around and get in the section in-between sides that you can fit into in order to attack him. Another diver is hiding amongst a pile of debris and all you have to do is charge the debris and follow him while charging to flush him out so you can get him (you have to destroy some nearby mines before you can do this though). And finally, there's one that involves you simply entering a pipe and smashing some debris.

The Deep: This time, you swim around the tunnels of a big mining rig deep below the surface of the ocean and destroy four power generators. The first difficult aspect of this one is an awful hazard that lies at each entrance to one of the four pipes leading into the cliff: boulders that get sucked down into the pipe. You have to wait for these boulders to come by before swimming into the tunnel because if you don't, they'll catch you out nine times out of ten. Getting caught by them means instant death because you get sucked down to a grinder. Navigating and turning in the cramped tunnels is difficult because of the less than perfect camera controls and it's very easy to get lost. I think all the tunnels in the cliff walls are connected but after destroying one generator, I would always swim back out and just go to the other entrances outside. This is one level where your sonar can really hinder you because it doesn't show any walls in your way. Finally, one tunnel has connections to all the generators and it can difficult to remember which ones you've destroyed and which you haven't when picking a direction to follow. Not the hardest level overall but it can be confusing.

The Facility: The first part of this level is a battle with a giant squid in a large tank. This has to be the most annoying boss battle in the entire game. First, the squid is constantly swatting at you with its two longest tentacles, which are almost impossible to avoid bumping into and every once in a while, it'll smack you hard enough to where you take damage. Second, its most damaging attack is one where it lunges at you. You have to get out of the way as quick as you can and if it gets you in your tentacles, you have to jiggle the control stick like mad to get loose and it takes a lot of health. It wouldn't be so bad if the camera controls didn't suck so much. You can't keep the squid in front of you long enough to wait for it to charge and when you see it coming, you usually can't get out of the way in time. Third, the area where you're battling is really cramped, with the squid taking up half of it, so there's not a lot of room to move around and avoid the attacks (this also makes the camera suck even more so). Fourth, you have to tear off the squid's tentacles. After you bite a tentacle off, you should be able to chomp on it later when you need health but I found that every time I tried to approach a tentacle to chomp it, it would go flying off and I would lose my chance to get health. Another annoying game glitch. Finally, there's the final part of the battle. After you've torn off all but the squid's longest tentacles and both its eyes, you have to lure it into charging into the electrified pipes on the sides of the wall. You have to do this four times and there were so many times where I died just before I could finish the squid off. My best advice is to just keep swimming around in a circle and eventually, the squid will slam itself into the pipes four times.

The other part of the level isn't as bad. You have to destroy another generator, flood a control room, and then kill the owner of the facility before he kills you (this last challenge is timed and you only have two minutes). The only difficult part up until the final battle is killing and eating all the divers that can damage you. During the final battle, you first have to take out two underwater craft that shoot torpedoes at you and then get the owner, who moves like a bullet. You have to be careful not to get caught in-between the tanks in the room because he'll sometimes lure you there. It's not that hard a fight, though (certainly not as annoying as that damn squid!).

Blood on the Beach: This is simply a couple of timed challenges. First, you have to kill five swimmers before they get to shore. This should be simple but some of these people just won't go down no matter how many times you attack them. The game is good enough to tell you when a person is dead but there were so many times where I was able to kill two to three people when everyone else would make it to shore and I would fail the mission. Maybe I just suck, I don't know. The second part challenge occurs when you use explosive barrels to blow a hole in an electrified net to enter an inlet. You have fifty seconds to destroy five boats here. I found this to be much easier than the first challenge, mainly because it's easier to destroy boats (for me, anyway). The third part of the mission is a boss battle with the mayor's yacht. You can't just simply chomp and charge the boat like before. Here, you actually have to push the boat into the barges in the pond until its energy bar goes down. Despite the yacht's high speed, it's not hard to complete this mission. The only difficulty is healing yourself after you get shot constantly by the snipers on the barges and then getting back to attacking the yacht.

The Final Chase: The last level is really just a final boss battle, this time against Brody and the Quint-esque shark hunter on the Orca II. It doesn't take much to destroy the boat but this is still difficult. First, the cutscene shows Brody fire a homing device on the shark and during the fight, if you swim too far from the boat, the device explodes and kills you instantly. To add to the difficulty, those annoying underwater crafts are out in full force here and respawn ridiculously fast. You'll die a lot of times right when you're about to destroy the boat because of those damn things and their torpedoes. The water surface is also really choppy, making it difficult to keep your head above water so you can see what you're doing. With a little perseverance, you will eventually win but the ending cinematic does make it feel like you've accomplished anything. All it does is show a helicopter finding the wreckage of the boat and dropping a bomb hoping to kill. The last shot is of your dorsal fin following the helicopter back to Amity. Big whoop.

Jaws Unleashed is a cool idea of a game but the execution is lackluster. The gameplay is repetitive and downright annoying at times, the controls are awkward, the camera is constantly fighting you, and you get killed far more often than you should. I never played the Jaws game for the NES back in the day but I have seen playthroughs of it and while this does have more to do, it doesn't seem like that much of an improvement. It's just a frustrating, annoying Grand Theft Auto wannabe that doesn't live up to the promise of its licensed source material. I only recommend it for the curious and trust me, if you don't have a lot of patience, you'll get sick of it pretty quick as I did initially.

B to Z Movies/Franchises: Jaws. Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

First thing I have to say is that I don't understand how this movie got made. I know Jaws 3 did pretty well, despite its enormous flaws, but did the series still have enough clout by this point for the studio to greenlight another sequel? It's truly mind-boggling. Anyway, this film is often regarded as the true nadir of the series and is considered one of the worst movies ever made. I can understand why people feel that way. This film really is bad but, call me crazy, I enjoy it a lot more than the previous movie in the series. If I have choice on watching either of the films after Jaws 2, I'll always go with this one. It's hard for me to explain but I'll try my best. Before I begin, I must say that this one is special to me because it was the first DVD I ever watched. When I got my first player for my sixteenth birthday, this was one of the four DVDs I got with it and it was the first one I watched so go figure.

This movie basically ignores the events of its predecessor, creating a new continuity for its returning main characters. It begins with Sean Brody living on Amity with his mother Ellen, whose husband Martin has died some time before from a heart attack. A few nights before Christmas, Sean, who is the deputy sheriff on the island, is sent out to remove a piece of driftwood from a buoy. While doing so, he's attacked and killed by a large great white shark. Ellen is now convinced that the shark killed Sean on purpose and is now stalking her family for what happened to the sharks in the previous films. To try to take her mind off things, she travels with her other son, Mike, and his wife and daughter to the Bahamas to spend Christmas there. While there, Ellen meets up with a carefree airplane pilot named Hoagie, who helps take her mind off the tragedy. However at the same time, Mike and his friend Jake, who work as marine biologists, encounter the great white shark, who has apparently followed Ellen to the Bahamas to kill her and her family. While trying to study the shark, Mike begins to think his mother's fears may have come true.

Okay, I must say that I do agree with those who complain that giving the shark a motive is ridiculous because it is. The sharks in the previous films were just being the big predators of the sea that they were, nothing personal. Giving the shark a motive goes into supernatural territory which cheapens the impact of the first film. Ironically, the seeds of this movie were sewn in a brief exchange in Jaws 2, where Brody is thinking that the shark in that film could be prowling around Amity for what happened to the original one and the biologist tells him, "Sharks don't take things personally, Mr. Brody." Granted, Brody's thinking in that film was no doubt motivated by fear but here, it's clear from the get-go that this shark does have a method to its madness. So, yes, I do agree with that complaint.

The director this time is Joseph Sargent, who worked with Lorraine Gary before on a TV, which is no doubt how he got her to do this film. That's one thing this movie had going for it, that its director had actual directing experience, unlike Joe Alves in Jaws 3. Unfortunately, that doesn't help the film overcome its shortcomings. Sargent is pretty good at directing the character moments in this film but when it comes to the suspense and action scenes involving the shark and underwater photography, he has no idea what he's doing.

I think some of the acting is good in this film whereas others aren't so much. Lorraine Gary reprises her role as Ellen Brody, making her the veteran of this series. The take on Ellen in this film is interesting, with her being as paranoid about sharks as her husband became in the second film. Sometimes it does work, like when she's worried about Mike having a job that has him in the ocean a lot and as she starts to lighten up when she strikes up a romance with Hoagie. However, there are other times where it comes across as melodramatic. Her rant in the kitchen after Sean's death when she is telling Mike to quit his job comes across as silly. During Sean's funeral, she's remembering the moment in the original when Sean imitated his father at the dinner table and she smiles, making some people at the funeral wonder why she's doing so. At another point, she tries to pick her granddaughter up but has to give her back to her daughter-in-law because she's too weak and starts crying for some reason. I'm guessing it has something to do with when Sean was a little kid but it just comes across as random. Also, as anyone who's seen the film knows, she has flashbacks to scenes from the first film and to stuff earlier in this one. One has to wonder how she remembers stuff that she didn't witness in the first place. Granted, she was there for the aforementioned scene in the original and the scene in this film where her granddaughter is attacked by the shark while on a banana boat but how does she remember her son getting killed when she didn't actually see it and how her husband killed the original shark? You could rationalize that Martin probably told her about what happened during the final battle in the original but the stuff with Sean? No, that's a goof.

Lance Guest plays Mike Brody and I thought he did a pretty decent job. He may not win any Academy Awards but I thought he came across as likable, particularly in the scenes with his mother, his family, and Jake. They could have done more with the notion that his mother's fears about the shark to creep in on him when he encounters it but it doesn't go anywhere. Still, I thought Guest was passable. And no discussion about Jaws: The Revenge would be complete without talking about Mario Van Peebles' infamous role as Jake, Mike's Jamaican buddy. I'll just come out and say it: I love Jake. Yes, I know Van Peebles is playing him as a typical stereotype but I always found him to be funny and likable. The scenes where he and Mike are ribbing each other does come across as two good friends to me. But I do agree that the bit at the end with him showing up after he was clearly eaten by the shark is bull. Did the shark swallow him whole and he came up after it was killed or what? If it just spat him out, where was he during the rest of the final battle? No excuse. Even Mike when he helps him says what we're all thinking: "The hell are you doing alive?"

Michael Caine plays Hoagie, the charismatic pilot. You really have to wonder what Caine is doing in this film. True, it was a sequel to the classic Jaws but I think if he'd seen the others, he would have known that this probably wasn't going to be a film he would be proud of. Caine claims to this day that he's never seen the film and the main reason he did it was for the money so he could build a house. He also was unable to personally collect an Oscar he received for another movie because he was filming this but he seems to look back on it with a tongue-in-cheek attitude. As for his performance, I liked the way Caine played Hoagie. As with Van Peebles as Jake, Hoagie is a likable, charming, easy-going guy with a good sense of humor, even when he's about to get eaten by the shark: "Oh, shit!" I do like that he survived, although how he swam from his destroyed plane to the ship and barely even got wet is something I don't understand at all.

Karen Young plays Mike's wife, Carla, who's an artist that creates sculptures for the island tourism trade. Not much to say about her. She's sexy and is a caring enough wife and daughter-in-law to Ellen, as well as gives Mike hell when she realizes that he knew about the shark all along and didn't tell them. Judith Barsi plays Mike and Carla's young daughter, Thea. Not much to say about her other than she's cute and really didn't annoy me. One dumb thing she does is what she says to someone as soon as she and her parents visit Ellen after Sean's death: "Uncle Sean is dead, you know. Will he come back?" Carla says, "We'll talk about that later, Thea." I think you should have talked to her about that earlier! (On a sad side-note, I found out that Barsi was murdered, along with her mother, by her insane father a year after this movie was made, which is really tragic.) Finally, Mitchell Anderson plays the brief role of Sean Brody. The one thing I have to say about him is that I do think his death is disturbing. The way the shark first bites his left arm off before killing is bad enough but the way he's screaming and that there are kids singing The First Noel nearby is quite disturbing to me. I actually saw this scene when I was a kid on TV and it really messed me up.

This film does suffer from some melodramatic and corny moments. There's a scene that recreates the dinner table from the original with Sean imitating Martin, only this time done with Mike and Thea. It is kind of touching but may succeed only in making viewers wish they were watching the original Jaws. Another weird part is the first scene between Mike and Jake. Jake gets really angry at him for taking off to Amity and leaving him with the workload, causing Mike to yell at him. Jake then very calmly says, "I'm sorry about your brother, man." That was a sporadic change of emotion! The most laughable melodramatic moment is when Jake "supposedly" gets killed by the shark. The entire moment is in slow-motion with no sound except the music and when the shark disappears beneath the water, Mike yells, "JAAAAAAAAAAKE!", which even echoes. I know it's supposed to be tragic but it comes off as just plain silly and overplayed. Plus, the guy's not dead so it was pointless.

The shark looks the worst in this film. It's so fake and lifeless that it's not even funny. As much as I bashed the shark in Jaws 3, I bought that one more than this (and that should tell you something). It looks like one of those shark toys I used to play with in the bathtub when I was a kid. When Jake first encounters the shark while operating the mini-sub, it literally seems as if the damn thing just floated instead of swam towards him and bumped him. Even when the shark is chewing on the side of the boat or coming up to attack people it looks fake. There are scenes where it's so far out of the water that it has to be balancing its tail on something right below the surface! A scene where the shark chases Mike while he's scuba-diving is particularly silly looking because Mike takes cover inside a shipwreck on the ocean floor and the shark still manages to squeeze inside of it. The sight of that big-ass shark swimming down corridors in that wreck (barely doing so, by the way) just makes me smirk. Oh, and the shark roars as well. During the finale, Mike and Jake put an electric device in its mouth that Mike uses to shock it to death. When he does so, the shark actually sticks its head out of the water and makes a T-Rex style roar. I'm pretty sure I've heard that roar in other movies, including the original Jaws after the shark is destroyed.

The most baffling part is the shark's death. As Mike continues to electrocute the shark, Ellen steers the boat right into it. When the bowsprit jabs into the shark, it blows up for some reason. To this day, I'm sure many wonder what the hell that was about. Some try to rationalize that the shark exploded because the bowsprit hit the device Jake put down its throat but I'm pretty sure that thing wasn't a bomb. From what I can gather, the ending was originally shot to depict the shark getting gutted by the boat and tearing it apart with its contortions, with Mike, Ellen, and Hoagie having to jump off the boat to avoid getting killed. Test audiences apparently didn't like this ending for some reason and it was reedited to produce the confusing ending that exists now. Interestingly, I think I've seen that original ending on some TV airings of the movie but the explosion is the one on the DVD. Also, right before the boat rams the shark, we get a sepia-toned shot of Roy Scheider saying, "Smile, you son of a bitch!" from the original (in Ellen's mind) and the shot of the decapitated shark sinking to the bottom afterward is from the original as well.

My favorite thing about Jaws: The Revenge is the music. Michael Small did the music here and it's pretty good. My favorite part of the score is the main title, which is a fairly tense piece of music with bits of John Williams' score for the original thrown in for good measure. It makes the opening title sequence (which is presumably from the shark's point of view as it prowls around Amity harbor) quite thrilling. I also like the new twist on the infamous shark theme that Small creates for this movie and the rest of the score is pretty good as well. This may be why I actually like the film despite its faults because the music makes it feel better than it really is. The only complaint I have with the music is that, as with the other two sequels, they use the shark theme too much and it gives away the shark's presence, ruining what suspense could have been created from it.

Since I've spent the majority of this review picking on the flaws of Jaws: The Revenge, you're probably wondering why I said I like it. Like I said, it's hard to explain. It could be because I saw it when I was young and I thought it was great then. Or could it be that I get enjoyment out of its flaws, being a lover of bad movies, and the fact that, despite those flaws, it feels like Sargent's heart was in the right place for the most part. I really don't know. All I do know is that I can watch this a whole lot more than Jaws 3, even though this is technically a worse film. But, a lot of other people didn't feel that way. This movie bombed, putting the final nail in the coffin for the franchise. Even though I do get enjoyment out of this, I am glad it was the last one because any further sequels would have probably been even more unspeakably bad than this film every dreamed of being.

Movies That Suck/Franchises: Jaws. Jaws 3 (1983)

When I came across this on the Sci-Fi Channel one day, I didn't even know at first that this was a Jaws movie. I just assumed it was some random horror movie about a shark terrorizing a water park. I think I'd seen the first two films as well as Jaws: The Revenge before I saw this one and since this is the only one that has no scenes on Amity or any cast members from the original, it didn't look like a Jaws movie to me. If I hadn't heard the legendary shark theme play, I would have never known. I didn't even know that it was originally in 3-D until I did a little research on it after seeing it. My opinion of it the first time I saw it has remained unchanged to today: while the movie is not out and out horrible, it remains my least favorite film of the franchise.

A new SeaWorld park is preparing to open in Florida, its main attraction being a series of underwater tunnels that snake throughout a man-made lagoon. However, a mechanic disappears while fixing a gate into the ocean that came off the rails for some reason. Mike Brody, the now adult son of Chief Martin Brody from the first two films, is the chief engineer at the park and the senior marine biologist, Katherine Morgan, is his girlfriend. While searching for mechanic in the lagoon, the two are attacked by a ten-foot great white shark. While the park's owner, Calvin Bouchard, and a visiting big game hunter, Phillip FitzRoyce, at first intend to kill the animal, Kay suggests that if they manage to catch it and keep it alive, they'd be famous for being the only facility in the world with a captive great white shark. They eventually manage to capture the shark but it dies after being put on display. When the mangled body of the missing mechanic turns up, everyone discovers from the state of the corpse that the shark they caught was a baby and the real killer, its 35-foot long mother, is inside the park. Before long, the enormous creature goes on a rampage throughout the park, injuring many people and causing a malfunction that traps a bunch of tourists inside the underwater tunnels. Now Brody and the others must save the trapped people as well as kill the shark.

Jaws 3 was originally meant to be a comedy spoof called Jaws 3, People 0, with the script written by John Hughes and Todd Carroll, who had just written Animal House, and Joe Dante was going to be the director. However, Universal didn't like the idea of a spoof and, along with new producer Alan Landsburg replacing the original ones, Richard Zanuck and David Brown, set out to make another serious film. Famed sci-fi writer Richard Matheson wrote the script and while he still gets credit, Carl Gottlieb, who revised the scripts for the first two films, also gets screenplay credit along with a guy named Guerdon Trueblood for the story. The director ended up being Joe Alves, the production designer on the first two films. This is the only film he's ever directed and when you see it, it's not hard to understand why. Matheson himself hates the finished film and even blasted Alves, saying he's a good art director but can't direct to save his life. I can't help but agree with Mr. Matheson.

Remember back in my Jaws 2 review when I said that even though I like that film, there's no tension whatsoever. That principle holds true for this one as well, only it's ten times worse. Not only is this movie not scary in the slightest but I've always found it to be kind of dull. You'd think a movie about a gigantic shark terrorizing SeaWorld would make for a hokey but entertaining monster movie. Sadly, no. Except for a fair sequence where the mother shark, just recently discovered, wreaks havoc on the park and injures a lot of people, none of the action sequences are interesting. When the actors are underwater interacting with the shark, it's even more boring for reasons I'll get into bottom line. So, that's the first fact that I must begin this review with: this movie is a dud.

The acting, while not the best, is decent for the most part. Dennis Quaid plays Mike Brody and he does a fairly good job at making him likable. He's a typical, blue-collar guy who's dedicated to his work as chief engineer of SeaWorld as well as keeping the tourists safe when the shark is discovered, putting himself in real danger to help the ones trapped in the undersea kingdom portion of the park. Bess Armstrong is also fairly likable as Katherine "Kay" Morgan, senior marine biologist and Mike's girlfriend. The interplay between the two of them as a couple is believable and there's even a dilemma where Mike is about to be transferred to Venezuela and Kay is not sure what to do about their relationship. Too bad it's solved so quickly and matter-of-factly that its being there in the first place was pointless to say the least. Still, I do like Kay for how dedicated she is to her job and Mike because even though he feels a bit neglected by her because of her duties, is never a jerk about it.

Simon MacCorkindale plays hunter Phillip FitzRoyce, who comes across as full of hot air and yet is kind of charming as well. Even though is gun-ho about killing the baby shark at first, he is good enough to go along with the plan of capturing and actually helps to save people when the mother shark goes on a rampage instead of just sitting around, doing nothing. His death is also the only thing part of this movie that makes me cringe in a good way. The way he gets trapped inside the shark's mouth and is eventually crushed to death (presumably by the pressure since he was far away from the teeth) is pretty nightmarish to me, made even more so by his muffled screams. I didn't care for his assistant Jack (P.H. Moriarty). The guy just came across an ass-kisser to his boss and acted like a douche to everyone else. Also, his accent is so thick that I can't understand more than half of what he's saying. When FitzRoyce doesn't surface after they finish trapping the shark inside a filtration pipe and climbs down a shaft into it and yells for him, I didn't understand anything he said. I also think he just flat-out disappeared from the film after that (if he got killed, I honestly don't remember).

Louis Gossett Jr. plays Calvin Bouchard, the manager of the park. While he's not quite as dickish as Mayor Vaughn, he's still a douchebag who only cares about making money. After Kay and FitzRoyce tranquilize the baby shark and nearly get killed in the process, all he cares about is whether the film of the event is okay. He orders the baby shark to be put in an exhibition tank without Kay's permission, resulting in its death. Also, after the mother shark is trapped inside the filtration pipe, he orders his engineers to shut the pumps down just so he won't lose any money in the process, which results in the shark being able to escape. Granted, he does seem concerned about the people trapped in the underwater tunnels and is good enough to help one of his technicians escape when the shark smashes into the control room but he does nothing to help his nephew and leaves him to be eaten. Bastard. Rounding out the cast is John Putch as the younger brother Sean Brody, who seems likable enough and the chemistry between him and Quaid is solid enough that you believe they're brothers. Like his father, he's now terrified of water because of the shark attacks in the first two films but that never goes anywhere. Finally, Lea Thompson plays Sean's water-skier girlfriend, Kelly, who's pretty spunky and fun but after she gets injured by the shark, both she and Sean disappear for the rest of the movie.

The shark effects in this film are poor. The baby shark doesn't look real and the mother shark DEFINITELY doesn't look real. There's real shark footage mixed with the model of the baby but there's no such technique used for the mother, making her believability suffer ever more. The biggest problem with the mother is that she lumbers around so slowly and has no life except when she opens her mouth and growls. As I've said before, the mechanical shark in the original did look fake a couple of times but was photographed so well that you believed it for the most part. Here, the camera holds on the shark too long and the lack of movement doesn't make her come across as anything more than what she really is: a big plastic sculpture. Also, sharks need to keep moving in order to keep oxygen flowing into their gills. This shark moves so slow that she would suffocate in less than seconds! But I haven't gotten to the worst shot of the shark in the entire film. After Mike and Kay finish repairing the underwater tunnels, they see the shark swimming towards them through the window in the control room. It looks as if someone took a still photograph of the shark and moved it slowly towards the camera because there's no fine movements, no tail movements, no breathing, nothing! The effect of the shark smashing through the window is even worse. That is just inexcusable for a movie that had a fairly good sized budget at the time of $18 million.

The 3-D effects are the worst aspect of the movie for me, even though I can't see them. Granted, I don't have the 3-D version of Friday the 13th Part 3 either but in that film, the 3-D is so simple, with objects mainly just coming close to the camera, that it doesn't bother me. Here, there are so many bad optical and matte effects with the underwater 3-D stuff that it's just nauseating. When Mike and Kay are investigating the lagoon in a little mini-sub, there are painfully obvious moments where the edge of the sub becomes transparent. The dismembered fish-head and arm that float towards the screen also look hokey and the shark's death is ruined by her jawbones flying towards the screen and just floating there after she's destroyed. I also think the film itself just looks bad. I don't know if it's the 3-D cameras they used or what but the film, especially the underwater scenes, just looks murky and ugly. (Funny thing about the 3-D opening titles. in the VHS releases of the film, the titles were replaced with generic, flat red titles and the 3-D ones didn't appear again until the DVD release.)

Another subplot in the film has to do with the two dolphins, Cindy and Sandy, who instantly sense the shark's presence at the beginning of the film. They pop up time and time again throughout the film, I guess trying to warn people about the shark. Honestly, they come across as just annoying. There's an instance where the shark seems to eat one of them (which should have happened), leading to the ending scene where Mike and Kay call for them after the shark's destroyed. It looks like Cindy made it but Sandy didn't... until she jumps out of the water, with Kay cheering. The last shot is a corny still of both actors framed in-between the jumping dolphins, with Kay yelling "All right!" Yeah, some people got killed but as long as the dolphins are okay, everything's just dandy! I so don't care about those damn dolphins.

The music for the movie is bad because it's so repetitive. John Williams had no involvement with this film and the music was instead scored by Alan Parker. The shark theme is, of course, part of the music but most of it is really generic music that seems to loop again and again. The theme that plays over the ending credits, as well as throughout the movie, drives me especially bonkers because it's so unoriginal and, as I said, loops. So bad.

Jaws 3 is the epitome of boring to me. Despite some fair acting, the movie is dragged down by an unconvincing shark, piss-poor 3-D and optical effects, unimaginative direction, and repetitive generic music. While I've seen much worse movies, this is what I call the Great White Turd, as Steven Spielberg described the troublesome mechanical shark in the original movie. This is a movie I only watch if I'm really (and I mean REALLY) desperate for something to watch and even then it's far from my first choice.

Franchises: Jaws. Jaws 2 (1978)

Jaws was one of those rare movies where, despite all the problems during production, everything fell into place and a classic was born. In fact, Universal regarded it so highly that even before the film became the biggest movie of all time at that time, they demanded a sequel. Three years later, Jaws 2 was released in the summer of 1978. This was the first of three sequels to Steven Spielberg's blockbuster that many fans and critics consider vastly inferior to the original. While the third and fourth films in the series are definitely not up to snuff, I've always had a soft spot for Jaws 2, having actually seen a good majority of it before I saw the original. While there was no way for this film to live up to the legacy of the original and it does indeed have its shortcomings, I still think it's a worthy sequel and a nice companion piece to Spielberg's classic.

It's been four years since the events of Jaws and life on Amity has gone on. Martin Brody is still the chief of police and still lives on the island with his wife Ellen and his sons Mike and Sean, who are now sixteen and eleven-ish respectively. However, a rash of mysterious incidents such as the disappearance of two divers, a mysterious water-skiing accident, and the mangled carcass of a killer whale lead Brody to believe that another large great white shark is stalking the waters around the island but, as before, Mayor Vaughn and the local government officials refuse to believe him. Brody's paranoia about sharks after the events of the first film lead him to do something rash enough to get him fired from his job. As if that wasn't bad enough, his two sons head out on a sailing trip with their friends and become targets for the shark.

Steven Spielberg wanted no part of a sequel to Jaws because he felt he'd already made the definitive shark movie and that doing sequels was a "cheap carny trick." However, seeing as how Spielberg would go on to direct all the Indiana Jones movies as well as one of the sequels to Jurassic Park, I personally think he didn't want to do it because he didn't intend to go through the torture he went through on the first film again. John Hancock was originally hired as director but due to his inexperience in making big budget movies like this and Universal's disliking of the dark tone he was going to bring to it, he was eventually fired. The guy who eventually took over was a French director named Jeannot Szwarc, who honestly didn't have many credentials at that time but got the job because he was friends with production designer Joe Alves. In an interview with Szwarc on the DVD, he said he felt the script focused too much on the action and some of the characters were not well developed and asked writer Carl Gottlieb to fix that (which I don't think he did but we'll get to that presently). Szwarc may not have been as talented as Spielberg when it came to characters but the action scenes in this movie are very well filmed in my opinion. I also feel that he did a good job in keeping the movie in tone with the original: while it's a serious horror/thriller, it also has a feel of fun and adventure to it rather than being all dark and dreary, as Hancock probably would have made it.

The main aspect of the film that keeps it in line with the original is that many of the actors return in their roles. Chief among them is Roy Scheider as Chief Martin Brody. Scheider did not want to do the movie, feeling that there was nothing new to do with it, but Universal used a contractual obligation he'd failed to live up to, as well as a big paycheck, to get him to do it. Scheider then reluctantly returned and decided to do the best he could. Despite his misgivings and constant fights on the set with Szwarc, I think Scheider turned in another good performance. Brody is exactly as he was in the first film and more: he's still a likable, charming chief of police, tough when he needs to be but fair. There's also an added layer to his character in this film that wasn't there in the original. After what he went through in the first film, you can see the concern and terror in his eyes when evidence that there's another shark prowling the waters around Amity begins to mount. He kind of becomes as paranoid and as obsessed with killing the shark as Quint was in the original. It comes to a head when he mistakes the shadow that a school of fish create for a shark and, without thinking, orders everyone out of the water and even shoots at the shadow. This leads to him being fired from his job and he feels like an idiot for what he did. But the next day, when a commotion comes up in the town, his need to check it out despite the fact that he's been fired leads him to discover that his sons are in danger and, being the dutiful and courageous guy he is, he takes it upon himself to save them and once again destroy the marauding shark.

Lorraine Gary returns as Brody's wife Ellen. While she doesn't have much to do, as in the original, she remains ever loyal to her husband, going as far as to defend what he did at the beach. In this film, Brody has a kind of rival when it comes to his wife in the form of Len Peterson (Joseph Mascolo), a businessman who's built a new resort on Amity and happens to be Ellen's boss. While it never becomes a big thing, Peterson seems to have a thing for Ellen and may resent that Brody is married to her. Again, this is never explicitly stated, (although there are some deleted scenes that would have made it a bit more upfront) but it is a kind of undercurrent to the way Peterson resents Brody's shark paranoia, going as far as to keep Ellen away from him after the panic on the beach he starts. This, coupled with the mere fact that his actions could ruin Amity's tourist trade, could have definitely encouraged Peterson to get Brody fired. Speaking of this, one thing I like about Ellen in this film is her last scene, after it's confirmed that there is another shark lurking near Amity. Peterson tries to make Ellen understand his position but she berates him for firing her husband, stating, "I don't give a damn what about your position. All I know is that a boy is dead and my son and husband are still out there!" I just loved seeing Ellen stick it to that bastard!

Murray Hamilton reprises his role as selfish Mayor Vaughn, who, to me, comes across not only as an even bigger jerk but as a complete idiot in this film. The fact that this guy once again refuses to believe Brody when he says that there's a large shark in the waters around the island makes him look like the most selfish idiot to enter politics (and that's saying something). He even says to Brody, "Don't press it this time." You mean like he pressed it last time... and was right? And what about all those people before that were killed... because of you? You're going to let that happen again? It's such a shame that the people of Amity apparently never find out what an asshole their mayor is because of they did, not only would he be fired but he'd probably be deported! (Again, there was a deleted scene that showed Vaughn in a better light. After the scene where Brody shows the town council the picture of the shark and they decide to have a private meeting about what to do about him, there was going to be a scene where the council votes about where they should fire Brody or not. Everyone except Vaughn votes for firing Brody, making it look like Vaughn really does believe Brody and is being pressured by the council and Peterson to go along with them. If it had been kept in, I do think this scene would have helped make Vaughn a little more sympathetic instead of a selfish jerk who learned nothing from the events of the original film.)

Jeffrey Kramer also reprises his role as Deputy Hendricks, who has a bigger role here than before. He remains ever faithful and loyal to the chief, even when he could easily think that he's lost his mind. I like the scene where Brody comes home after he's been fired and he tries to promote Hendricks as the new chief. Hendricks, ever the loyal deputy, tells Brody that he doesn't want his job and says he's the greatest. Really makes Hendricks a likable character. I also like how he at first tries to stop Brody and Ellen from taking the police boat out on the water but eventually decides to help them, stating, "What the hell, they can't fire both of us. Someone's gotta be in charge." In his last scene, I like the less than positive look he gives Peterson after Ellen scolds him for firing Brody. He's the kind of deputy you'd want to have if you were in charge.

Where the film falls flat for me characterwise is the teenagers who become prey for the shark in the film's last half. Remember when I said that Szwarc asked Carl Gottlieb to help flesh out the teenagers? Well, they failed big time because when it comes to most of these kids, I don't remember who's who. It's never a good sign when I remember the majority of the names of the kids from slasher movies but I remember hardly any from the sequel to one of the best films of all time. The main one is Mike Brody (Mark Gruner), the oldest son of Martin and Ellen. There's some character there, like the arguments that he and his father have about him getting a job for the summer and his father ordering him to stay out of the water. Still, it doesn't really amount to much in the long run. Also, how in the world can he be sixteen when he seemed to be only like nine or ten in the original, which takes place four years before? The younger brother, Sean (Marc Gilpin), has even less to his character, mainly just being the little brother who wants to tag along and is a pest to Mike. There is one nice moment with him where he helps his father pick up the gun-shells after he causes the panic on the beach and Brody is clearly touched by it. Other than that, one good thing I can say about him is that I didn't find annoying, although the part where he blackmails Mike into taking him with him on his sailing trip is a bit douchey.

Now, I will try to name the other teenagers but I know I won't get all of them. I definitely know and liked Tina Wilcox (Ann Dusenberry), who seemed like a fun, spunky girl and I felt bad for her when she sees her boyfriend get eaten by the shark and is hysterically frightened when Brody, Ellen, and Hendricks find her. Not much to say about her boyfriend Eddie (Gary Dubin) other than he and Tina seem to have a nice relationship and his death scene is memorable. Amongst the other teens who end up stranded by the shark, the one I remember the most is Andy (Gary Springer), Mike's big, curly-haired friend. I can't help but like him since he seems like the type of person you'd want to hang out with it. The only scene with him I don't like is when they're trying to save Sean after a girl named Marge (Martha Swatek) has been eaten right in front of him but Sean is too scared to tie the line around the boat he's stuck on. Andy gets tough on him to get his attention and threatens him. Okay, I know they're trying to help him but the poor kid is scared to death and you're threatening him? Andy does make it clear when they finally get him across that he really does care about him but I just found it to be a little extreme. I definitely remember Donna Wilkes as Jackie, a cousin of a friend of Mike's named Brooke (Gigi Vorgan) (I think), mainly because once they're stranded by the shark, she becomes very hysterical and screams a lot. That leads me to Larry (David Elliott), Vaughn's son, who comes across a major dick, blowing up at other teenagers once they're stuck, especially Jackie when she becomes hysterical. Like father, like son, huh? I definitely know Keith Gordon as Doug, but that's only because I remember him from Christine. He has one funny moment where he over-inflates a part of his boat and it pops right after he's been acting all melodramatic, making him look like a dork. G. Thomas Dunlop is memorable as Timmy mainly because he's so mopey and sure he's not going to get a girl, although he does end up with one. And I remember Cynthia Glover as Lucy because at one point when things look their bleakest, she says a prayer. I know there were some other teenagers but I can't for the life of me remember their names. I'm surprised I remembered as many of them as I did (I had to look at a credits list for half of them anyway).

One complaint that's always thrown towards Jeannot Szwarc's direction of the film was his decision to show the shark clearly from the first attack to the end, instead of going the Hitchcock route and not showing it for most of the film like Spielberg did. His reason for doing so was because he felt the legendary chumming scene from the original could never be duplicated so they might as well just show the shark. Me, personally, I've always felt that when you're making a sequel like this, you should know what the fans want to see and what they wanted to see, in this case, was the shark. The route that Spielberg took in keeping it hidden for the most part was cool but by the time you get to a sequel, the audience knows what's going to happen and they know what they're paying money for: to see the monster do its thing. So I think you should just give them what they want and I agree with Szwarc's decision. Now that said, I do think he could have filmed the shark a lot more skillfully. When Spielberg finally showed the shark in the original, he almost never held on it so long that you could tell it was fake. Granted, there are a couple of times in the original where the shark does look a little iffy but for the most part, I think it still holds up. However, in Jaws 2, there are plenty of shots where the shark is clearly fake. One is where the shark first kills a water-skier and then attacks the woman who was driving the boat. You can clearly tell that the shark is made of rubber because they hold on it for too long. The shot where it looks the most artificial is a scene where Mike is floating in the water unconscious and his friends just barely manage to pull him onto the raft before the shark swallows him whole. As the shark passes by the boat with its big mouth open, you can see the mechanisms down its throat. It's brief but it's noticeable.

I did like that they gave this shark a distinct look with him getting burned very early on, disappearing for most of the film and then when he reappears, he's got a big ugly scar on the left side of his head. However, I don't feel that they ever got it to look real. I know that they were basically painting a scar on the side of a big mechanical shark but honestly, that's what it looks like. It doesn't look natural and it just looks painted on. Having said that, I honestly can't think of a way they could have fixed it because that's tricky: making something look real on something that's already artificial. While it was cool, it just never looked all that real to me. And plus, like they did in the original, they use real shark footage intermixed with the mechanical one and every once in a while, it doesn't match because there's no burn. Speaking of which, there's a moment where the shark almost gets a guy who's para-sailing and when it cuts back to an above water shot, the shark's fin or tail is briefly seen and he just looks small. I've always felt he looked small at that moment. My final thought about the shark is that I love the way he's destroyed at the end. Some people may think it's a little farfetched but the spectacle of the shark biting that cable, getting the crap shocked out of him, getting set on fire and sinking down into the water is a sight I saw as a kid and thought was amazing then and I still do now. Like the climactic destruction of the shark in the first film, I like the buildup to it where the shark is racing towards Brody and I like the line he says: "Open wide!" Nothing can top, "Smile, you son of a bitch!" but I liked that as well. And I you still think that the death of the shark here was farfetched, watch the death of the shark at the end of Jaws: The Revenge for comparison (I'll get to that later!)

The death of the shark brings up a gripe about the film that I agree with: Jaws 2 is way too derivative of scenes from the original. While I like the similar buildup to the death of the shark here, I agree with those who say that this film copies too many scenes from the original. Since it's a sequel, it's nice that they kept the same general spirit and tone of the original but doesn't mean they had to out and out plagiarize stuff from it. Some of it includes more scenes with Brody having to deal with the inane troubles of the townspeople (first it was karate students chopping picket fences; here it's noisy police scanners and teasing women), a dead body convinces Brody that there's a shark in the waters (it's a dead whale this time instead of the remains of a victim but still), and then there's the reused plot device of the mayor refusing to believe Brody, which, again, makes Vaughn look even more selfish and stupid than he was before. There are also some scenes that are just blatant rip-offs of some of the original rather than just being similar. One is a beach montage that looks awfully similar to those in the original to me. Even though I like this movie, the first time I actually saw it I was thinking, "Really?" But the one that really gets me is the ripoff of the infamous head scene with Richard Dreyfuss from the original, this time involving Brody investigating a big piece of driftwood and being startled when the remains of a shark victim come right up in his face. That was so blatant and it didn't work at all, unlike the scene in the original. That one really does disgust me whenever I watch the movie. Bottom line, while it doesn't completely ruin the movie for me, it is kind of disappointing that recycled so much from the original when writing the script for this one.

I don't think Jaws 2 has the level of suspense that the original had. That's a given, naturally, but when you watch the two films back to back, it's clear that Szwarc doesn't have the talent in creating and maintaining suspense that Spielberg has. Even though Szwarc decided to show the shark completely, I think you can still show the monster and make the suspense work. I think this movie's biggest problem is that they use theme too much which instantly gives away the shark's presence. While the original is famous for that music, if you watch it again, you'll notice that the music always did a slow build whenever the shark was stalking someone from nearby and never hit you full force with the "da-dum, da-dum" until the shark either appeared or full on attacked someone. Here, you hear that theme full on whenever it's even hinted that the shark is nearby so no tension builds. There are also some moments where it's quiet music wise and then suddenly the shark pops up but I don't know if it's just because I've seen so many horror films or what but I don't think they work here. They only one that got me was when the shark comes out of the water to attack the helicopter and even that didn't get me as much as a scene in the original where Hooper and Quint are pulling in a rope and the shark suddenly pops up.

With what I've said about the music, you probably think I hate it but I don't. I think they could have used the iconic theme better but most of the music that John Williams wrote for this film is really good. The opening music is absolutely beautiful, especially when it swells as the title comes up in front of a school of fish. I also really like the music that plays during the moments where Brody is looking out at the ocean when he suspects that there's another shark out there. I also like the music that plays when Brody has caused the panic on the beach and Sean is helping him pick up the bullet shells. The music that plays over the ending credits is a nice one and a good compliment to the similar music in the original. All in all, it may not be as memorable as the score from the original (how could it?) but I do like this film's music score.

Jaws 2 is definitely not a perfect film. A good majority of the characters are forgettable, the shark is not as skillfully filmed as before, and there are too many scenes that copy from the original. Still, it's a fun two hours. The returning cast members are still on form, the film feels very in line with the original, and the new music score by Williams is very well done. Even Roy Scheider said once that, despite how much he didn't want to do it and the arguments he had with Szwarc, he thought it was a pretty good sequel and that's how I feel. Was it necessary for it to have been made? No, but since money talks and a sequel was going to be made no matter what, it's lucky that we got one that doesn't tarnish the reputation of the classic original. Unfortunately, that luck wouldn't hold out for long.

Franchises: Jaws. Jaws (1975)

You know how I first became aware of Jaws? When I was a very little kid, I saw an ad for Universal Studios in Orlando. It was a painted ad in some magazine and it had a picture of King Kong and the shark on it. Obviously, I knew King Kong but I asked my Mom, "What's that shark?" She said, "That's Jaws." She then proceeded to tell me a little bit about the film and the infamous, "Da-dum, da-dum" that accompanies the shark whenever he's stalking his prey. From that point on, I went through life knowing the basic story of the film and seeing bits of it on TV every now and then, even seeing a Dateline show about the real USS Indianapolis but I never actually saw Jaws until my sister got me the two-tape special edition of the movie as a Christmas present in 2000. The first tape had the movie whereas the second one had a 75-minute documentary along with deleted scenes and outtakes (not having a DVD player at that time, I didn't know what this was) as well as some trailers.

That set also made me aware of something that I didn't comprehend beforehand: how beloved and influential a film Jaws is. I knew that it was well known, obviously, but I had no idea that it was the highest grossing movie ever at the time of its release and is regarded as a classic not just in its genre but among movies period. I soon found out, however. Everyone knows this film and many also know of its influence. It created the summer movie season and gave Steven Spielberg his career. It also ruined beach-owners' business for years, as well as cemented sharks' reputation as terrifying animals. You ask anybody who's afraid of the ocean and sharks in particular why that's so and they'll usually blame Jaws. Also, anybody who's read about the making of the film knows that it almost never came to be because of the ridiculous amounts of production problems, particularly how the large mechanical shark they built was a major pain and almost never worked (so much so that Spielberg says that he often called it "the Great White Turd"). But that's neither here nor there. I'm here to give you my impressions of the film. The question is: do I think the movie is good and does it deserve its reputation. Well, I can't really answer the second part of the question because I wasn't around to personally experience the phenomenon the film was when it was released but as for the first part, yes, I do think this is a good movie. Damn good, in fact.

Everyone knows the story: after a young woman is found mutilated after she disappeared while swimming, the small island community of Amity discovers that there's an enormous great white shark prowling the nearby ocean. Police Chief Martin Brody is determined to keep the townspeople and the beaches safe but is undermined by the greedy mayor, who wants to keep the beaches open for the profitable Fourth of July weekend. After more people are killed, Brody joins up with shark expert Matt Hooper and eccentric captain Quint to hunt down the shark. But what starts out as a simple hunt turns into a fight for survival as the enormous shark proves to be a formidable enemy and puts the team's lives in danger.

Jaws is actually kind of like two movies in one. The first hour is a slow-paced thriller involving Brody having to deal with the mayor and his attempts to keep the public safe, which end up failing. It's here that we're introduced to Matt Hooper and he and Brody quickly become friends. Quint is also introduced here but he remains mainly in the background for most of this half. It's also here that Brody and Hooper learn just what they're up against when the body of the first victim is examined and they find the remains of a boat that the shark attacked. After a devastating attack on the beach on the Fourth of July, the mayor agrees to hire Quint to kill the shark. Brody and Hooper join Quint on his small boat the Orca in their hunt for the shark, beginning the second hour and where things really get good. From there on, the movie is a rousing action-adventure film, with a lot of great character moments and skillful suspense thrown in. To sum it up: the first half is a movie that I like and the second half is a movie that I love.

Chief Martin Brody, played by Roy Scheider, has to be one of my favorite heroic characters in horror and suspense films. From the moment you first see him, he's a likable, funny character who's devoted to his duty of keeping the townspeople safe but is forced not to say anything or he could possibly lose his job. When Mrs. Kitner, the mother of a kid who's killed by the shark, slaps Brody and then blames him for her son's death, it cuts to a scene of Brody sitting at his dinner table and you can tell he's really hurt by what happened, perhaps feeling guilty that he didn't stand up to the mayor and therefore, could have kept the little boy from being killed. He's also afraid of the water, which makes both for a sense of him having to overcome his fears when he goes out to kill the shark and for some comedy. I like the scene where he, his wife Ellen, and Hooper are talking and Ellen talks about his fear of water. When she asks if there's a scientific term for his condition, he simply says, "Drowning." The way he says that is so deadpan that, even to this day, it makes me smirk. He also, of course, has the famous line, "You're going to need a bigger boat" when he gets a good look at how big the shark is, a line that I think was a brilliant improv! Another thing about Brody is, despite his good intentions, he's kind of out of his depth, both being police chief in Amity as well as aboard the Orca. As police chief, when he's preoccupied with the idea that there's a shark in the nearby ocean, he's ignoring the trivial problems that the townspeople and has to be sort of wishy-washy with them. And when he's helping hunt the shark aboard the Orca, he's tying ropes the wrong way, pulling the wrong knot and causing compressed air bottles to spill all over the deck, and is clearly getting seasick when he has to throw chum out in the water. But what I like most about him is when he's come through as a real hero at the end of the film, putting himself right in the path of the shark as he tries to shoot the compressed air tank in its mouth. His line, "Smile, you son of a bitch!" and the way he says it is the epitome of badass in my opinion.

Matt Hooper, played by Richard Dreyfuss, is another instantly likable character. Dreyfuss plays him with a very gee-whiz quality, giving the impression of a young and dedicated shark expert who gets in over his head when it comes to the politics of the town and when he realizes the size of the animal he's trying to kill. If you've read the original Peter Benchley novel, as I have, you'd know that he's much more likable here than he was there, coming off as a slimy, unlikable character in the book. I really enjoy the relationship between him and Brody. The chemistry between Scheider and Dreyfuss is great. It's obvious that while both men have respect for each other, they're not above some good-natured ribbing, even though they've only known each other for a couple of days or so. One exchange between them that I like is, while searching for the shark one night, Brody finds out that Hooper is quite wealthy and he says, "It doesn't make any sense that they'd pay someone like you to watch sharks." Hooper says, "Well, it's also odd for someone who hates water to live on an island." Brody: "It's only an island if you look at from the water." Hooper looks at him and sarcastically says, "That make a lot of sense." Hooper, despite being likable, does have his limits and he becomes very irritated with the mayor when he's refusing to accept the fact that he has a major shark problem. When Brody almost blows the Orca up by untying a bunch of compressed air tanks, Hooper angrily yells, "Damn it, Martin!" By the end of the film, when their situation is becoming more and more dire, Hooper becomes very serious and high strung, snapping at Brody when he was just going to ask him a simple question. Hooper's terrifying battle with the shark in the underwater cage is another iconic moment and you can see the terror in his eyes. Finally, when he and Brody swim to shore together at the end of the film, it's made everything the two have gone through together worthwhile.

Rounding out the three main cast members is Robert Shaw as Quint, the grizzled shark hunter. His motivation is clear: he doesn't care anything about the town or the people but will kill the shark for them... for a price. He doesn't think much of the other fishermen on the island, scoffing when a bunch of them catch and kill a shark that couldn't possibly be the one they're after, and when Brody and Hooper offer to join him in the hunt, he makes it obvious that he doesn't respect Hooper, accusing him of being a pampered city boy who hasn't worked a day in his life. He also tells them that he's captain on his boat and they'll do whatever he says. He continues to refuse to listen to Hooper while pursuing the shark. And yet, there's a great scene between all three men when they're more than a little drunk after a hard day of hunting. I like how it starts off really funny and casual, with Hooper and Quint comparing injuries, Quint telling a funny anecdote about how a big Chinese arm-wrestler about broke his arm, but when Brody notices the scar of a removed tattoo on Quint's arm, that's when he tells them about the USS Indianapolis. This is when we find out about the source of Quint's eccentricities and his hatred of sharks, as he tells of the ordeal he and the other survivors went through stuck in the middle of the ocean with sharks threatening to kill them at every turn. He says that when a rescue helicopter eventually showed up to pick them up, that was when he was the most scared because he was sure a shark was going to kill him right before he could be rescued. This is hinted at later when the Orca is so badly damaged that it begins to sink and Quint glances at the life-jackets, calling back to when he said he'd never put one on again. He gives them both to Brody and Hooper, not putting one on himself. Quint's obsession to kill the shark apparently drives him temporarily mad (although some could argue that he wasn't quite right to begin with, judging from his peculiar actions and from what happened to him), as he pushes the engine of the Orca too far, causing it to blow out and making them sitting ducks for the shark. Ironically, his obsession is what ultimately leads to him experiencing exactly what he was afraid of: being eaten alive by the shark. I'm glad they changed his death from the novel (where he's simply pulled overboard by a harpoon rope) because this is much dramatic and ironic. It's also the goriest scene in the film and it's amazing this movie didn't get an R-rating for it.

The movie also benefits from a very good supporting cast. Lorraine Gary plays Brody's wife, Ellen. While she's not in the film that much, she comes across as a loving wife who supports her husband every step of the way and even becomes concerned when he starts to become obsessed with finding out everything he can about sharks. My favorite moment with her is when Brody is telling their kids to get out of the small sailboat they're sitting in on the water. Ellen at first tries to assure her husband that nothing is going to happen to them when they're sitting in shallow water... and then she sees a drawing in a book showing a shark biting through the bottom of a boat. She immediately pulls a 180 and yells at her kids to get out of the water, just as her husband was doing a few minutes ago. The look Brody gives her is priceless. Also on hand is Jeffrey Kramer as Brody's deputy, Leonard Hendricks. Again, this character doesn't have much screentime but he seems like a nice enough guy who dutifully follows Brody's directions (he would get much more to do in Jaws 2).

The most despicable character in the film is Mayor Vaughn, played by Murray Hamilton. This guy is an absolutely greedy asshole who's willing to risk the lives of the townspeople just so he can make a lot of money. He tells Brody after the major attack on the beach that he was acting in the town's best interest but I honestly believe he was just thinking about filling his own pockets. I just hate how smarmy he is towards Brody when he's telling him to keep quiet about the possibility that there's a dangerous shark roaming the waters off the island. You get the impression that he influenced a coroner to say that the first victim was possibly killed by a boat propeller, even though Brody says that's not what he first told him. He's the one responsible for young Alex Kintner getting killed and when his mother takes it out on Brody, that selfish jerk just stands by and doesn't say anything. Before that, even after the first beach attack, when Brody says that the beaches are going to be closed, Vaughn overrules him again and says they'll only be closed for twenty-four hours. It's also disgusting how he acts toward Hooper when he's trying to warn him about how enormous and dangerous the shark is, ending it by saying, "Love to prove that, wouldn't you? Get your name in the National Geographic?" Vaughn's the real villain of the movie, not the shark.

Steven Spielberg has said that his intention was for the shark to be the real star of the film. He intended to have the shark appear fully on camera for most of the movie, chomping on people left and right. However, when it became clear that the mechanical shark that they built wasn't going to work hardly at all, Spielberg had to severely overhaul his vision of the film, keeping the shark off-camera until the last third of the movie. Ironically, many people, like me, feel that this made the movie even better than it would have been had the shark worked well enough to show on-camera as much as he originally intended. Granted, there would have been nothing wrong with the shark appearing in every scene and, for someone like me who loves monster flicks, it would have been exciting and awesome but not showing the shark gave the film a Hitchcock-like class that it wouldn't have had otherwise. Because of that, Jaws became a great example of the less is more approach to horror films. For instance, the opening scene with Chrissie Watkins (Susan Backlinie) was supposed to show the shark actually come out of the water and swallow her whole. While that would have been undoubtedly cool, it's unlikely that the scene would have been as iconic as it is if it weren't for the fact that you don't see the shark but with her being dragged around and screaming, you get an idea of the shark's strength and can imagine him ripping her apart below the water. Scenes like the death of the Kintner boy or the two men who almost become food for the shark when they try to catch him may not have been as suspenseful had the shark just come out of the water and bitten them in half and the movie itself might not have been as well remembered.

In these types of horror flicks, not showing the monster for a good portion of the movie is a great build-up to when you finally do see it in all its glory. However, I feel that this is one instance where Jaws drops the ball a little bit. Everyone comments that the first time you see the shark is during that classic scene where Brody is chumming, makes a joke, and then the shark suddenly sticks his head out of the water. That's a great, classic moment no doubt but it's not the first time you get a good look at the shark. You actually see the shark for the first time when he attacks Brody's son Michael in an estuary and kills a man in a rowboat. Because it's not as classic as the chumming scene may be why many don't remember it but you very clearly see the shark chomping on the man and it's on the surface of the water no less. Now, the chumming scene is still classic, no doubt, but it just kind of puzzles me when everyone says that's the first time you really see the shark when it's not. As a result, I feel the power of the chumming scene is sort of diminished when you put it into that context, but it's still a great shock moment and classic nonetheless.

As for the shark himself, does the look still hold up nowadays? For the most part, when you see the shark, the effects do still hold up. The main reason for that is because Spielberg doesn't let the camera linger too long on the shark and you see just enough of him to convince you that he's real (something that the sequels did not do, as we'll see later). For me, the only parts where the shark looks fake is near the end of the film after Quint has been killed and Brody is left to fend for himself. When the shark smashes through the sunken inside of the boat to attack Brody, I feel that the shark does look a little hokey right there and also when Brody climbs up into the crow's nest and stabs the shark repeatedly in the head with a spear, you can see little patches where the paint has fallen off the mechanical shark's head. Still, these are just instances of nitpicking and they don't ruin the movie at all. The believability of the shark is also helped by the real shark footage shot by Ron and Valerie Taylor that appears during the attack on Hooper in the underwater cage. The best part of the real footage is an instance where a shark got its nose caught in the cage and went crazy, thrashing around in an attempt to get loose. Because the cage they used was small, it's totally believable that this real shark is the enormous one we've been seeing throughout and scenes like this just make the illusion all the more believable.

One skill that I think Spielberg is underrated for is his ability to create suspense. If you've seen his made for TV thriller Duel, you'd know that when he wants to, Spielberg has a Hitchock-like ability to make you tense and he would use that in later films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jurassic Park. Jaws in particular is a great showcase of his skill. As I said, the mechanical shark's refusal to work when needed forced Spielberg to resort to the "less is more" style and he makes great use of it. The underwater POV shots of the shark watching his victims are very well done, as well as when he closes in for the kill, like when he rushes toward the Kintner boy. Or take the scene before that when Brody is sitting on the beach, watching the water and sees a dark shape that he thinks may be a shark but turns out to be a dark diving cap on a man's head or when a swimming girl suddenly screams but it turns out that her boyfriend (at least I'm assuming it's her boyfriend) came up between her legs and picked her up on his shoulders. That's great use of suspense. But the scene that really nails it for me is the first scene where the men are on the Orca, hunting the shark. There's a closeup of Quint with his big fishing rod in the foreground that's completely casual with him taking a bite of a cracker and Brody is off-camera, trying to figure out how to tie a good knot... and suddenly, the rod moves with a soft clicking. Quint calmly glances down at it as it moves and clicks again. The music, as well, is menacing but is very soft and calm as Quint prepares to try to reel in whatever has grabbed the line. Brody and Hooper, all this time, are completely unaware until the reel starts going out like crazy with a loud screech and the scene is on. Great suspense.

One scene that never fails to scare my mom is the scene where Brody and Hooper discover Ben Gardner's wrecked boat in the middle of the ocean and Hooper investigates the hull in his scuba gear. While he's investigating a large hole in the hull, the head of Gardner suddenly floats down into view and the music does a long sting that is effectively startling. Mom always jumps at that, even when she knows it's coming. I also must admit that that scared me to death when I first saw it. It has to be the best shock moment in Spielberg's filmography. I think Spielberg kind of regrets putting that in to this day because he felt it diminished the scare of the chumming scene but I personally think both scenes still work very well.

You can't talk about Jaws without even mentioning John Williams' iconic score. That "da-dum, da-dum" has become forever tied to when you're swimming out in the middle of the ocean (or any body of water for that matter) and you wonder what might be lurking below you out of sight. Also, you can't swim with anyone else without that inevitable person acting like he or she is stalking you and humming that music. It's part of our culture and how could it not? It's the first thing you hear at the beginning of the film. You hear some odd sounds when the Universal logo comes up and after a few seconds, you hear that theme start slowly and build up. It's even ironic that it's the first thing you hear in the movie because when you bring up Jaws to anyone, the first thing they'll do more than likely is imitate the theme. It has a lot of variations to it in the ways it's used throughout the film. When the shark is swimming amongst the swimmers in the first beach scene, it starts off kind of serene but becomes tense and ever faster as he closes in on the Kintner boy. Or there are times where you don't hear the music at all and it suddenly comes out of nowhere, like when Hooper and Quint are trying to tie the rope attached to the shark to a cleat and the shark suddenly comes out of the water. Also, the theme is never used for a false alarm. During the scene where two boys cause a panic by swimming amongst some swimmers with a fake fin, you may notice that the theme doesn't play, which should be a hint that it's not the shark.

The shark theme is so famous that I feel that other parts of the score get overlooked as a result. My favorite part of the score is actually not even the theme but the music that plays when Quint tells the USS Indianapolis story. That is a very eerie piece of music and accentuates this man's fear and hatred of sharks. It's made all the more eerie because you hear a whale singing off in the distance afterward but at first, like Brody, you wonder, "What was that?" I also really like the soft parts of the score, like the slightly sad melody that plays during the scene where Brody is sitting at the dinner table, thinking about what Mrs. Kintner said to him, and notices that his young son Sean is imitating him. It's a nice piece of music. Also notable is the exciting crescendo in the finale as the shark races toward Brody as he tries to shoot the compressed air tank in its mouth, as well as the serene ending music as Brody and Hooper swim to shore together. It's a great closure to the film: the nightmare is over, the monster that terrorized Amity Island and killed many people has been destroyed, and the two heroes standing are going home for a much needed rest. You can't ask for a better closure to such an awesome flick.

I know it's typical for someone to say this but honestly, Jaws really is one of these rare movies where, despite some minor flaws here and there, everything comes together perfectly for me. The acting and characters are spot on all around, the suspense and real terror is palpable, the music is iconic and goes perfectly with the visuals, the special effects for the shark still hold up today for the most part, and the film, all told, is a fun and exciting two hours. My dad likes to tell the story of how he and his brothers saw the film when they were on vacation in Florida back in 1975 and afterward, his brothers constantly came up behind him and grabbed him in their attempts to scare him. The fact that this film had an effect on a member of my family who's not too keen on those types of movies for the most part should tell you how iconic it is. So, to answer the question I posed at the beginning of this review, to me Jaws deserves every pit of its enduring popularity and is in my top fifty (at least) favorite movies of all time.