Yeah, that's the scene that everyone was discussing when the movie was released. Watching it today, it is just as scary, and gets me every single time! Watch it without the sound on, it loses a bit of the impact without that orchestral stab just before the Magic 8-ball head float. Oh, I recently did my annual viewing of the movie (4k) with my son and his fiancée who had never seen the film before! The movie is 25 years older than her and wasn't really a video staple in her native country, so she got a pass from us for that! So, it was interesting to see that it still scared her even though her past movie experience was viewing scarier and gorier stories. She was truly scared during several scenes and she understood why the film is so revered. It didn't stop her from jumping in the ocean the next day!
Rewatched a while back and surprised how good it stands up. Regardless of the shark the essence of the film is the three leads interacting and chemistry and good writing never dates. If you can only see a scary monster film that's your loss.
This is still a great film. I think a lot of it comes from a bit from the little things, such as the ‘70s style of more natural casual manner of the bit players, the easy humor which isn’t OTT slapstick stupidity like you might get now (I’m talking characters who act obviously stupid, constant motormouth joking going on, etc), and there are no “bad guys” on the human side. The mayor is a bit of a Herb Tarlek type jerk but he’s also not a villain. He’s a bureaucrat who’s trying to maintain the town’s reputation, which is perhaps a sort of villain but for the purposes of the film he acts as a gray area character. The three main characters are all very different, very smart guys, very funny guys, and have mutual respect for one another by the end without having had any moments that point it out. Obviously it remains frightening and exciting, too.
This is really noticeable. They look like real people, not like they've been working in the gym hoping to get noticed so they can get the part of a cop who gets shot five minutes into TV show.
'Jaws 2021' starring: Will Ferrel as Quint Jason Bateman as Brody Ben Stiller as Hooper And ! DeNiro as the Amity mayor
I haven't watched Jaws in decades expecting it to be scary. When I saw it in theatres as an 11 year old, the only scary instance for me was the head popping out of the boat. Though suspense did abound. But its still a wonderful film with great performances by the three lead characters of Quint, Hooper, and Brody. The second half of the movie is perfect, at least in terms of storytelling. It hasn't lost its bite, modern audiences have merely been conditioned to expect...something different. Be it faster pacing, more violence, more explosions, or witty one liners. The film is fine.
Well, I'm with her in her (dis?)regard of Spielberg, in general. It is a slow and rather overlong prelude to the Great White hunt which begins on the sea in earnest with the three main stars. And since the pace has been glacial the increase of intensity of the actual hunt really works. Still.
i still like it. people are going get angry with but i think that duel is a spielberg movie that did not hold up. i remember when i was a kid my parents did not let me stay up and watch the whole thing. i was pissed. then i watched it on svengoolie a few seasons back and i found it to be rather mechanical, particularly the character development and the dialogue.
maybe modern audiences like the unexpected.... like a shark suddenly taking a bite out of Samuel L Jackson
Its a great movie, but I’ve never been one to describe it as a horror movie. If you go into it thinking it as one then, yeah, I can see someone being underwhelmed.
Personally I don't *hate* E.T., but it's never been very high on my list of favourite Spielberg movies. I've watched it maybe 2 or 3 times in my entire life. Jaws, on the other hand, is one of my all-time favourite movies.. not just of Spielberg's, but of any filmmaker ever.
I was swimming in the ocean last week (off Wakayama, Japan) and was thinking of Jaws... No, it hasn't lost any of its bite! It's one of the best films I've ever seen... despite the climactic moment of the shark "leaping" (uh-huh) onto the boat, which is just silly. That silly moment is only 10 seconds and doesn't ruin the film or anything, but it's a minor point off what is otherwise a 10/10 film. I still say the Quint / USS Indianapolis scene is the best scene in the history of American film. Nothing beats it. “Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into her side, Chief. We was comin’ back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. We’d just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for about a half-hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn’t know, was that our bomb mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn’t even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin’ by, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the shark come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin’ and hollerin’ and sometimes that shark he go away… but sometimes he wouldn’t go away. Sometimes that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn’t even seem to be livin’… ’til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’. The ocean turns red, and despite all your poundin’ and your hollerin’ those sharks come in and… they rip you to pieces. You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don’t know how many sharks there were, maybe a thousand. I do know how many men, they averaged six an hour. Thursday mornin’, Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Boson’s mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up, down in the water, he was like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he’d been bitten in half below the waist. At noon on the fifth day, a Lockheed Ventura swung in low and he spotted us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Hooper here, anyway he spotted us and a few hours later a big ol’ fat PBY come down and started to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went into the water. 316 men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.”
My wife had never seen the whole thing and watched it last week. She really enjoyed it and thought it held up well, as do I. Then we watched the sequels and had a good laugh.
It's a great scene. It also sets up the one possible fault in the plot. When Hooper and Brody use it to make the case to the mayor, all the emphasis is on the banged up boat and the lost smoking gun aka the shark tooth. Well, what about poor Ben Gardner who was chewed up? Hooper talks about dropping the tooth because he had an accident. He sure did. Poor Ben's head floats out and scares the bejeesus out of him thus dropping the tooth. Yet there is no mention of Ben Gardner now being dead.
I believe I recall reading that the Ben Gardner "head" scene was a reshoot to ratchet up the scares, so I think that may be why its a bit of a miss in terms of continuity.
That's true. Spielberg felt the film needed one more scare and they shot that in someone's pool. It was a late addition, which probably explains why Gardner wasn't mentioned previously.
