Jaws is one of my favorite movies but I have noticed its ratings/reviews are getting worse as the years go by. Maybe people are spending less time at the beach these days.
shareIt's one of my favorites too, if not my all-time favorite. Lately it seems as though it's been "cool" to dislike things that are widely received as great. I've noticed a similar trend for other classics. Aliens comes to mind. I've even seen the original Star Wars put down recently.
shareCould it be because younger people just seeing it are in tune with the idea that sharks are endangered and don't like the "just kill it" attitude of the characters? That attitude made sense to people back in the 70s, but it doesn't so much now.
shareCould be. Youngsters seem to have missed the class in school on context.
share@jann-6 Not sure if it's that, I'm sure that definitely lends to some of it. More so, it seems as if it's just about going against the grain.
shareThe pace is slow and the shark is unconvincing. On the plus side the acting is great and the script is teeming with quotable dialogue. Unfortunately, the titular shark is what people primarily want to see and Spielberg fails to deliver here.
shareI'll never understand when people say that the shark is unconvincing. How much expression can a shark have? It seems like a pretty good approximation of what a 25+ foot great white shark would look like if it acted like this.
I also disagree about the pace, this movie flies by. In comparison, I rewatched Star Wars recently (1977) and I felt that that movie dragged on incredibly slowly (though I still love it). I don't know what it is about Jaws, but everything about it remains interesting for me from beginning to end.
I think Jaws had a great pacing about it. Never once in my 20 + years that I've been watching it did I find any sequence to be boring. I think what's so great about is the humanity in the characters and the charm that the actors give to them, that's what I enjoy a lot about the movie, just watching and listening to the characters go back and forth.
shareThink that people nowadays are more used to see sharks in videogames than in documentaries. So their idea of a "realistic" shark would be closer to Sharktopus.
shareIt's paced real well. Clocks in at about 2 hours before credits, the first hour is on Amityville, sets everything up real great like, funny sense of humor and horror, real looking locals and then the final hour is at sea. I was always impressed at how symmetrical the movie felt, especially with the scenes at sea being so complicated to shoot.
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Age is a factor. Most references to sharks is with the Asylum films. Older movies don't always hold up to the spectacle of a guy jumping through a shark with a chainsaw. It doesn't diminish how awesome Jaws is. Today's audience is just distracted by other movies. Just be glad they don't use nostalgia marketing to do reboots of Jaws where they tell the back story to Brody. They'd probably make him a crooked cop who uses his knowledge of the mafia to get a sweet gig in a small town... where he plans to run drugs.
shareJaws will never sink. Obviously its dated and some people won't appreciate it for that reason but that shit happens all the time.
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