Headscratchers / Jaws: The Revenge

• Why exactly does the shark explode at the end? Has there ever been an official explanation?
  • They threw a bomb down its throat. The ending is rushed and confused due to all the reshoots, but one of the revised endings is them throwing an improvised explosive device down the shark's throat which (in cliched movie fashion) waits until the last second to explode. Why the shark roared; now that is a stumper.
    • It's not a bomb thrown down the shark's throat but an electromagnetic impulse machine Jake devised in an effort to disorient it. And this was always part of the film, not part of the reshoots. The shark explodes for absolutely no reason. As to the roaring, in the script, the shark began roaring at Ellen because she ran it over in the boat. She turns the ship around to do it again and this is when the shark starts standing out of the water and roaring at her. Of course, this did not make it to the final film and it's unknown if it was ever actually shot, but it was in the script (said script going so far as to refer to the shark during this scene as "an old boxer looking for a knockout punch in the fifteenth round").
  • Perhaps the "explosion" was intended to be yet another flashback, this time to how the shark from the original film died. It's only new footage rather than a clip because Ellen hates sharks so much that she pictures it as a more gory demise than what Jaws put on screen.
• Why does Ellen "remember" events in flashbacks she never saw in the first place?
  • In the case of the first film, perhaps Martin told Ellen about what happened to him and how he killed the shark. She’s probably remembering the story, but we, the audience, are seeing it via footage from the first film. Similarly, after witnessing Jake’s supposed death, she was thinking about what Sean’s final moments were before his demise, again using stock footage of a few scenes earlier to give the audience a clue as to what she’s thinking.
• So is the shark supposed to be a relative/descendant of the first shark or what? I would assume so as why would it want revenge for some unrelated shark?
  • It possibly doesn't, but because of past events, Ellen believes the shark does.
  • Well, if we acknowledge the novelization, both the first and current sharks (and probably the one from the first sequel, cuz why not?) are being controlled by a witch doctor with a grudge against the Brody family. Yup.
    • Worth bearing in mind that the witch doctor concept was present in the original screenplay, which is what Hank Searls used as his source material when writing the novelisation. Director Joseph Sargeant admitted in interviews that "a mystical point of view... a little magic" was the big idea for trying to find something new to do with the shark.
    • Actually the novelization says that the shark in this movie is the offspring of the sharks in the first and second movies (the second one being its mother).
• I guess this headscratcher applies to all the sequels, but I'll mention it here because in this movie they imply the reason Martin Brody had a fatal heart attack was out of fear of another shark attack. That being the case, why didn't the whole family just move to, say, Nebraska, or some other state not next to the ocean? You can't say they couldn't afford it, as in this very movie they move from New England to the Bahamas (and I'm almost 100 percent sure a house in the Bahamas is more expensive than Nebraska.)
  • Perhaps the Brodys simply didn't want to or couldn't at all?
• Michael is walking on the beach with his wife when he suddenly runs away. He literally just sprints off with no explanation. We don't even see where he went. Why? Where was he going?
  • Perhaps he was running to the hills, running for his life.