There are some movies that no matter much time goes by they are never dated. They stay strong as an immovable boulder in a river of garbage (whoa, simile overload). These movies tend to be groundbreaking landmarks of cinema. They change their genre or the industry in general.
Jaws tells the story of a shark terrorizing a summer town and the three men who set out to stop it.
Like many great films, the premise is simple. The story arc is simple. Unlike some movies that are determined to start with as loud a bang as possible, Jaws begins subtly and thus is all the more terrifying. A girl goes night swimming. All of a sudden something grabs her from beneath and thrashes her through the water. She screams in agony, disturbing the peaceful night, until she is suddenly pulled under and it is silent once again. As if she was never there. It's this subtlety that makes Jaws so powerful.
It's a movie that simply suggests the horrifying potential of what we do not know or understand. What is scarier than what we don't know? Water is a horrifying thing. There are many scary things in water, and the biggest and scariest of them all is the shark. Everything about a shark is scary. Steve Spielberg takes advantage of this.
Jaws still stands amongst very few when it comes to the monster genre. Not many movies in any genre have stood the test of time like Jaws, and for that it deserves heaps of credit.
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