'JAWS' 50th Anniversary Review

In the winter of 1975, when I was 8, my uncle invited me to go to the cinema. I did not know what that was. ‘It’s like a big TV’, he told me, ‘Except, it’s in colour’, (we had a black and white TV back then because the license fee was cheaper). The film we saw was ‘Jaws’.

We didn’t have the internet in 1975, so I was unaware of the impact this film had already made on the world, and the huge impact it was about to make on me. My uncle probably assumed that I would be terrified out of my wits. What he didn’t know was that since I was 5, I had already watched so many horror films on the TV: ‘Dracula’, ‘Frankenstein’, ‘Wolfman’. For me, monsters were not things to fear. Monsters were my friends. When I watched ‘Jaws’, not only did I make a new monster friend, but also, I fell in love with the magic of big screen, Technicolor storytelling.

I was also in awe of the sound and the music. John Williams’ iconic score, so simple yet ingenious. His music went on to become the soundtrack for my entire life. It seemed like every film I went to see after that, his music was there waiting to take my hand and lead me through another transformative adventure.

While all around me full-grown adults were screaming in terror, I was beaming from ear-to-ear. This was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. Every frame and every line of dialogue, every bar of music was imprinted into my memory like a recording. What made it even better was experiencing the thrill of the story with so many other people. It made the story come alive in a way I had not known before, watching Boris Karloff on the tiny monochrome screen.

The character that fascinated me the most was Quint. He killed sharks. But it wasn’t just a job for him. Something horrible had happened to him that left him with an obsession to even the score. Even though he survived the horror of the Indianapolis, in a way he was already dead. The man he would have otherwise become was lost, and now the only thing that gave him purpose was revenge. Many people experience trauma in their lives. But if you allow yourself to be defined by your trauma, it will consume you.

A thing I noticed straightaway about ‘Jaws’ was how the dialogue was structured. In the films and shows I had watched on TV, characters would take turns in speaking their lines. But in ‘Jaws’ often characters would talk over each other, or there would be people talking in the background, just like it was in real life. Far from being off-putting, this made me a feel a stronger connection with the story, because I felt that this was not a group of actors playing a scene; these were real people, and I was watching their stories unfold as they happened as if I existed in the same air as they did.

It's astonishing when you realise that in the 2 hour and 4 minutes runtime of the film, the shark has only a total of 4 minutes of screentime. Yet its presence overshadows everything. Like the shark, the film is a lean and efficient animal that gets the job done. Ironically, the same cannot not be said of the animatronic shark they built, which as everyone knows, was constantly breaking down – which led the director Steven Spielberg to have one or several breakdowns during and after the production. It was his personal Indianapolis. But instead of letting it break him, he went on to grow beyond it and become undisputedly the most successful film director of all time.

This past weekend, I went to see ‘Jaws’ again on the big screen. This time I was with my two friends, Kat and Anna. We were like the three main characters on the shark boat. I was Quint, of course, being the oldest, cantankerous, confrontational, and with a fondness for Ritz crackers. Kat I would say was Matt Hooper, because she’s pugnacious and doesn’t backdown, and she’s the shortest. Anna would be Chief Brody, because she doesn’t need anyone’s authority to close the beaches. It’s weird to think that when I watched ‘Jaws’ for the first time, neither of my friends were even born yet. I am getting on in years, but I still feel young in spirit, and my passion for stories remains undimmed. Seeing ‘Jaws’ again was like revisiting an old friend, with two of my newer friends who also share a love stories and storytelling. It was great to see that after half a century, the shark was still working.

'Jaws' Classic Trailer