Blu-ray Review: Jaws

Steven Spielberg's Jaws has become a cultural icon in the years since its release in the summer of 1975. The film has been considered many things, including the godfather of the summer blockbuster, and the film that propelled Steven Spielberg's career as a first-rate director of action/adventure movies. Jaws may well be all of those things, but in the end it's also just a great movie. It's easy to talk about its importance in Spielberg's career, its influence on movie merchandising, or its effect on the movie business in general, but at the center of it all is a movie that did everything right. Great storytelling, great characters, great acting, and the greatest villain of all time—a giant, man-eating shark.

At the time the film went into production in 1974, Spielberg was only 26 years old. He was becoming a rising star amongst Hollywood insiders, but he was virtually unknown to the public. He had only directed one feature film prior to Jaws. That film, Sugarland Express, had been enough of a hit to help pave the way for Spielberg to take on bigger projects. Still, handing the reigns of a huge project like Jaws to a virtually unproven director had to have been a giant leap of faith for the studio. As documented in the special features included on the new Blu-ray release, the film was fraught with production problems, the biggest of which being a mechanical shark that didn't always work on cue. Shooting on the ocean, near Martha's Vineyard, rather than a huge tank also proved to be no small feat.

The end result however was a near perfect combination of drama, adventure, and horror. The shark may have been mechanical, but its presence was very real. John Williams’ masterful score and iconic theme song evoked terror without even a glimpse of the shark itself. At the heart of the movie are the characters. Sheriff Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), shark expert Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and the salty sea captain Quint (Robert Shaw) make up an unlikely, but perfect, trio of shark hunters. Hooper is the intellectual, Quint is the realist, and Brody is the everyman. Hooper is convinced his education and expertise in shark behavior is the answer to Amityville’s shark problem, while Quint knows his real life shark-hunting experience is what’s needed. Brody just wants to solve the problem so that life goes back to normal.

Article Author: Sherry Lipp

Sherry writes mostly music and DVD reviews, and on occasion she gets to do an interview. She plays the guitar, loves to read, watch movies, and write. Sherry also is a gluten free food blogger, and enjoys coming up with grain and sugar free recipes.

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