\nRoy Scheider and Lorraine Gary star in “Jaws,” returning to theaters Friday for its 50th anniversary. Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
There are some fun shark movies that show everything, like The Meg<\/i> and 47 Meters Down.<\/i> Those films are more in the exploitation model, giving the audience exactly what’s advertised, which the Jaws<\/i> sequels also became, for better or worse.<\/p>\n
In Jaws<\/i>, the hunters who come to Amity create a false sense of relief when they kill the wrong shark. This is performative theater. As long as locals see a dead shark they’ll still attend the beach and frequent the local businesses.<\/p>\n
Mayor Vaughn tries reopening the beaches twice and is proven wrong both times, with devastating results. The stakes become more than just life or death; those involved also can’t trust authorities to make the right decisions.<\/p>\n
Only Hooper and Brody are asking the right questions, and they confirm the dead shark had no traces of the victims in its system. They also ascertain as much information as they can before embarking on the voyage with Quint, exploring wreckage to determine what they’re really up against.<\/p>\n
This sets the stage for the seafaring adventure in the film’s second half. Jaws<\/i> went over budget and over schedule, but there’s no denying that filming on the real water looks better. Waterworld<\/i> and Cutthroat Island<\/i> ran into similar troubles, but they did not ultimately produce Jaws<\/i> at the end of filming.<\/p>\n
The script by Benchley and Carl Gottlieb gets a lot of mileage out of the three different personalities on the boat. Hooper the intellectual, Quint the physical man of action and Brody the everyman are all necessary, and each has his weaknesses and blind spots.<\/p>\n
The Avengers<\/i> did a little bit of that, with Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and Hulk each embodying different philosophies of heroism. Those philosophies were assigned by their powers, such as Iron Man having infinite wealth and technology, but found the humanity in them.<\/p>\n
If it were easy to make Jaws,<\/i> everybody would do it. That’s why there’s still only one Spielberg and very few directors in his class.<\/p>\n
Still, summer used to be populated with variety that was fun and rewarding. Hopefully filmmakers will embrace basic themes like man against nature (and each other) to bring a little bit of classic excitement back.<\/p>\n
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aug. 27 (UPI) — Jaws is credited with inventing the modern blockbuster, which has defined summers for 50 years. Returning to theaters Friday, the movie exemplifies the ideal to which new tentpole films should aspire. Based on Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel, Jaws shows how a local story can become universal. The film centers on a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1984318,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[356855,356858,349878,356857,356860,356856,341393,356854,356859,320410],"class_list":["post-1984317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-amblin-entertainment","tag-chief-brody","tag-jaws","tag-peter-benchley","tag-photo-courtesy","tag-richard-dreyfus","tag-robert-shaw","tag-roy-scheider","tag-shark-attacks","tag-universal-pictures"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Jaws-re-release-still-exemplifies-summer-movies.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1984317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1984317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1984317\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1984318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1984317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1984317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1984317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}