The Jaws Thread

@futuremoviewriter Happy to give my thoughts on each of the sequels.

Jaws 2: Tries the most to be an actual sequel but suffers from annoying characters and a lack of energy from the people in the movie. Roy tries to give an actual performance in a story that doesn't do him many favors. Hooper is gone because he had no desire to come back (rightfully so honestly but doesn't help matters.) The effects are actually decent at times and a few memorable scenes exist. Decent watch but nothing that really justifies its existence.

Jaws 3D: The most ridiculous of the movies and the one that just blatantly ignores the previous entries the most. It feels the most divorced and the cheapest looking of the bunch. It's also a bizarrely bad commercial for Sea World which makes it kind of hilarious. It's probably the funniest of the sequels and makes for "so bad it's good" at times.

Jaws The Revenge: I hate this movie. Probably the worst movie overall in this franchise because of how aggressively boring it is. The pacing is terrible and the plot is just stupid without being funny. It just fails the hardest at actually being a fun movie and despite trying to take itself seriously it somehow gets worse because it makes you more mad at its failings than if it simply didn't try. It's also just hard to watch because it has the little kid from Land Before Time who got brutally murdered in real life to the point where it's kind of impossible to watch this movie without feeling shitty. And the movie is just so terrible that there isn't any redeeming qualities to it.

As for a potential Jaws 5 or Jaws Remake.... just no. Not gonna happen. Too much would work against either of these things. This is a film you can't remake. I mean, you can, but it will fail. I love this movie to death but trying to remake it is pointless. Instead of trying to make "the next Jaws" simply look at the things Jaws does well and apply these techniques and ideas to new movies. Works better.

Edited by Patar136 on Nov 20th 2023 at 8:36:13 AM

At the least with the Jurassic Park sequels, many like the second one and the third is at least tolerated by enough I suppose. With Jaws, the stank of the third and fourth films is probably still too strong even 30+ years later, which is really saying something.

The two Meg movies also probably make it really hard to do another Jaws movie too just by existing.

Also, yeah. What happened to Judith Barsi is a horrific tragedy and it's the stuff that nightmares are made of. I won't be able to watch Land Before Time the same way again after learning about that.

Edited by futuremoviewriter on Nov 20th 2023 at 9:28:49 AM

The only Jaws sequel worth exploring is how Amity Island tries to recover from the ordeal. And it pretty much wouldn't be a shark movie. Just a political movie of small town economics.

The only Jaws installment worth making these days is Quint's days during WWII onboard the USS Indianapolis, mainly because it offers a quite different kind of horror involving sharks and the sea.

I would probably agree that those would be stories the audience would likely rather see at this point. Haha.

And even then, part of the problem with a Quint prequel would be all the other problems about prequels. Some things are just cooler in your head or when you don’t know about them. We know Quint can’t die so there will be slightly less tension. They will overexplain or complicate things.

Not to say it can’t be done. On a technical level this type of movie isn’t that hard to film. But if you wanna make something on the same level as Jaws? That will take serious commitment, vision and skill which I don’t think is likely to happen.

Something that doesn't do that would feel like schlock like the Meg movies probably are. The original Jaws is definitely NOT that. Original Jaws was very grounded and realistic and that's what made it so effective.

Edited by futuremoviewriter on Feb 5th 2024 at 3:19:55 AM

That's precisely the point. Quint is more effective as a story left to the imagination. I'm just saying that it's the only story worth exploring involving sharks because having another Great White terrorize Amity Island or wherever the Brody family lives is simply a parody by this point.

The USS Indianapolis is a story worth telling on-screen. It just doesn't need to be related to Jaws because testimonies of real-life survivors, even if you knew they were going to survive, are horrifying enough to draw audience attention.

As I said, a story with shocking realism would work way better. The first Jaws was for the most part extremely believable and realistic and that helped with the horror of the situation. Having a smaller world also significantly helped too.

From the sound of things, the second definitely tried to recapture that realism. Maybe Joe Johnston should handle a sequel that's shorter and just focuses on the action like he did before—and I didn't even like Jurassic Park III by the way. Haha.

I remember one review I read that said that focusing a sequel to Jaws on Brody was the wrong direction to take. Basically, their argument that Brody was just a police chief of a small island town. There really wasn't really a lot you could do to justify him running into another killer shark again without it seeming contrived or repetitive. He's not really gonna leave Amity Island, so of course the shark's gonna attack Amity Island again.

They instead proposed that a sequel should've followed Hooper instead, since as a marine biologist who specializes in sharks, of course he's going to encounter sharks or want to go to areas where there's been shark attacks. With Hooper as a main character, you could focus on him going to a new location and interacting with new characters, which would've probably helped in making the sequel feel more fresh compared to what we got.

Granted, that might have depended on who you got to write or direct the sequel, but it was an interesting idea I heard for how you could make an interesting Jaws sequel.

I could see maybe Hooper or someone asking Brody's help and him at first refusing, but then making his way over anyway. Not as contrived as I suppose another huge Great White that just happens to attack the exact same town would be. Spielberg probably figured it was the best way to be consistent I suppose.

I’d be down to talk more about the production of Jaws 2. I know that the first movie set a trend of these movies being hard to make.

One detail that is interesting was how Roy Schneider and the director hated each other, coming to blows often. You get this sense that they were only working together because they had to.

Also, the original plan was to have Hooper but Richard Dreyfuss wasn’t coming back without Spielberg. It’s kind of a shame because had this series been given some actual love it might have been the Indiana Jones parallel. Who knows? Based on how the sequels went, it’s kind of clear this probably wasn’t supposed to go beyond one movie.

The second movie still had Spielberg as director though… That's why I thought the JP comparison was apt: Lost World was also directed by Spielberg.

See here. You will find that Spielberg dropped out early.

One of the funniest moments is how one of the characters sets herself on fire because she doused herself in gas. While a pretty brutal death, it's a case of "too dumb to live."

Oh. Mandela Effect strikes again I guess.

Then again, I'd heard he barely worked on Lost World due to Amistad pulling his attention away, so there you go. It's a miracle both the first Jurassic Park and Schindler's List each turned out as great as they did certainly since he worked on them at the same time.

At the least, Jaws 2 provided one of the most iconic taglines of all time though.

Edited by futuremoviewriter on Nov 22nd 2023 at 10:13:25 AM

That is a damn good tagline I admit.

"Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water."

My dream pitch would have been Hooper recruiting Brody to go with him on an adventure in the South Pacific where they come face to face with swarms of reef sharks that are acting unusually aggressive. A premise like that would have been very exciting.

Yeah. Seeing those two together again would've been great. Sad it never happened.

Tbh I wouldn't mind an actual good movie about the Indianapolis with maybe a cute little homage to Jaws to sort of act as a "spiritual prequel" but that would be about it.

I still need to see the Meg movies as I said. Those look like they're trying to do a high concept version of Jaws.

Deep Blue Sea was pretty fun though. That was both crazy and fun at the same time. Yeah it was cheap, but you appreciated the over-the-top and flippant overall presentation certainly.

Glad to see I found another Jaws enthusiast. Makes me not regret starting this thread.

What's your favorite scene from the original?

I've often brainstormed various ideas for a potentially interesting Jaws sequel and so far there's only one concept that I feel could work.

You'd start off as a typical Jaws sequel, where a Brody descendant, a Hooper descendant (if not Hooper himself) and a Quint-esque hunter have to take on a killer shark. But then half-way through the story, the dynamic gets turned on its head and it's actually one of the human characters who's revealed to be the true villain.

Maybe the Brody descendant has straight up snapped from their family constantly fending off sharks and becomes determined to kill as many sharks as they can. Maybe the Hooper analog gets too invested in the studying the shark that they start acting increasingly reckless and negligent of the others around them, all in the name of research. Or maybe the Quint type character becames a full on ahab like figure. Either way, one of them would become utterly corrupted by the experience.

That's the one pitch I came up with that I felt had potential......until I realized I essentially just pitched Moby Dick. That or, hell, the original Jaws since Quint's obsession with hunting ol' Bruce already caused conflict with the other characters in the original movie. Lol rip

Only ever saw the first one all the way through. Saw parts of Jaws 2 here and there, but never the whole thing though. That's probably the only other Jaws movie worth seeing it seems at this point.

Strange that the movie that set the standard of a blockbuster was of all things a killer shark movie. Then again, maybe not though.

Edited by futuremoviewriter on Nov 22nd 2023 at 10:14:51 AM

I find it very hilarious that Seaworld was not allowing Free Willy to be filmed there but were totally okay being the location for Jaws 3D.

Talk about priorities am I right?

Edited by Patar136 on Nov 29th 2023 at 12:58:06 PM

SeaWorld thinking Jaws 3-D was good marketing from what I can see is the equivalent of anyone thinking Leonard Part 6 was good marketing for their products—that there being one of the most infamous examples of a terrible movie selling itself to the public primarily through excessive product plugs that don't really make anyone want to rush out to get said products.

Edited by futuremoviewriter on Nov 29th 2023 at 11:57:41 AM

I haven’t seen Jaws 3-D in years. It’s the sequel I have probably watched the least.

Strangely, Jaws IV is set around Christmas. And it doesn’t work. I can’t help but feel that the one Brody son getting killed as “First Noel” is getting sung by those kids was just so silly it was hard to take seriously. It made things just so… weird.

Aside from the Meg movies, Deep Blue Sea makes it REALLY HARD to be able to do another Jaws movie too. That movie is so fun and just embracing the ludicrousness of the situation that that's really hard to be able to do well now certainly.

The first Jaws was fun, but it also was balanced in how it made itself both a fantasy and a reality at the same time in the best way possible—and that just seems like a very hard thing to be able to recapture by the end of the day it seems.