Steven Spielberg’s Jaws went overbudget and overschedule, but the troubled production paid off for Universal as it quickly became the highest-grossing movie of all time when it hit theaters in 1975. Jaws is credited as the first summer blockbuster, or the reason Hollywood inundates audiences with high-concept genre movies every year when the sun comes out. It became Spielberg’s calling card, launching a filmmaking career that would continue for another half a century. Along the way, he broke his own record twice with E.T. and Jurassic Park.

While Jaws’ influence can be seen all over modern Hollywood filmmaking, its influence can be seen more specifically in the slew of shark-infested rip-offs that followed. Like Night of the Living Dead and Die Hard, Jaws has been used as a rough template for a whole new subgenre: the shark thriller. Jaws’s imitators tend to focus primarily on the shark (or sharks), but the shark in and of itself isn’t what makes Jaws such a timeless gem.

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The shark in Jaws is just the external conflict that gets the three very different lead characters stuck together on a boat in the middle of the ocean. The real substance of the story is the tension, bickering, and growing camaraderie between Brody, Quint, and Hooper. Like all the best horror films (Alien, Halloween, Rosemary’s Baby, House etc.), Jaws takes its time introducing the characters and their interpersonal dynamic before putting their lives in danger.

Brody, Quint, and Hooper on the Orca in Jaws

This isn’t to say that all Jaws rip-offs have ignored the need for a human story, but none of them have pulled it off anywhere near as effectively as Spielberg’s masterpiece. 2016’s The Shallows shoehorned in a generic B-story about whether Blake Lively would finish medical school, but it was hard to care about that when she spent the whole movie on a rock in the middle of the ocean, half-submerged in water, being circled by a vicious, bloodthirsty shark. This is because finishing medical school has nothing to do with fending off a shark. In Jaws, Brody’s character flaw – his fear of water – is directly linked to the threat posed by the shark.

2018’s The Meg just made the shark a lot bigger and threw in a Jurassic Park-adjacent prehistoric reawakening angle. The Shallows and The Meg are both fine movies that provide plenty of entertainment, but Jaws went above and beyond. It was one of the defining movies of the New Hollywood movement – widely regarded to be the greatest era in American cinema – and it still holds up after nearly 50 years.

Unlike its many copycats, Jaws isn’t a movie about a shark; it’s really about Martin Brody confronting his phobia of the ocean and sailing out to sea to blow up a 25-foot great white that’s been terrorizing his town. Brody is an everyman, played brilliantly by Roy Scheider. When we meet Brody, he’s recently moved from crime-ridden New York to sleepy seaside Amity, where he fears the treacherous waters that surround him.

Brody and the shark in Jaws

At the midpoint of the movie, Brody assembles a crack team to voyage out into the ocean and kill the shark, forcing him to face his fears. The team is rounded out by Richard Dreyfuss as Hooper, a seasoned oceanographer, and Robert Shaw as Quint, a grizzled shark hunter. Real animosity between the actors on set created a tangible tension between their characters on-screen.

Unlike a lot of classic horror films, Jaws doesn’t waste any time getting to the big scares. Alien and Audition take their time getting to the gory stuff. In Jaws, Chrissie Watkins is eaten alive in the opening scene and the shark attacks a crowded beach and claims the life of an unsuspecting child at around the 15-minute mark.

Character moments like Brody’s son mimicking his actions at the dinner table and Hooper and Quint comparing gruesome scars, complete with an embarrassed Brody quietly deciding not to show his own little scar, are just as interesting as any of the shark attacks. Quint’s iconic Indianapolis speech serves as the calm before the storm, introducing the terrifying extent of the threat presented by the shark before it sinks the Orca and eats one of them alive (incidentally, the one who survived the Indianapolis disaster).

Brody and Mayor Vaughn in Jaws

What stands out the most about Jaws’ framing of the shark – despite the fact that it irreversibly vilified majestic great whites in the pop culture landscape – is that the shark isn’t the real villain. It’s just a relentless force of nature doing what it does best. The true villain is Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), the unscrupulous mayor who refuses to close the beaches and essentially allows a bunch of tourists to get eaten by a giant shark so he can line his pockets with a few extra dollars during vacation season.

When Alex Kintner’s mother slaps Brody after finding out he knew about Chrissie’s death and the presence of the shark, he acknowledges his own role in her son’s death and steps up to the plate. He assembles a shark-hunting dream team and sails out into the unknown to take matters into his own hands, bypassing the bureaucratic red tape put up by Vaughn. Ultimately, it’s a story about a plucky individual circumventing the obstacles placed by a corrupt institution to ensure justice is served, following the same universally resonant themes as Paths of Glory and The Wire.

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