Happy Birthday, Bruce: Jaws @ 50!

Fifty years ago today, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) was released into the wild, into the world, and into the film industry and its golden anniversary is being celebrated globally with much hype and fanfare, including here, at Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction (which, as we all know, is possibly the UK’s second longest-running sf/f fiction zine and approaching its own silver anniversary). I wrote about the film’s impact on me, on Hollywood, and on sharks in the wild (none of which were particularly good) in my review of Jon Turteltaub’s The Meg (2018) so I won’t say much about any of that here. I will say that for all that harm the film may have done, it is in my opinion – and quite literally – almost perfect as a work of cinema and entirely deserving of its 97% on the Tomatometer. If it were up to me, I’d push that to 99%, deducting 1% for Bruce, the mechanical shark named after Spielberg’s lawyer. The problem is that Bruce moves like a wind-up toy (which is essentially what he is) rather than whipping through the sea like a fish in…well, water. It turns out I’m not the only one to have problems with Bruce and Jon Harvey’s recent article in the Guardian reveals that the decision to show very little of the shark until the end was motivated by practical rather than artistic considerations. Let me say one thing in Bruce’s defence (it being his birthday): what he lacks in speed and suppleness, he almost makes up in menace and mass. One more thing about Jaws before I move on to thoughts about recent imitations and the Sharksploitation genre more broadly. A few months ago I read Peter Benchley’s much-maligned 1974 novel, on which the film is closely based, for the first time. I thought it was good – very good, actually. Where the film is let down a little by Bruce’s performance, the novel suffers a little more from Benchley’s inability to write convincing women but is otherwise a compelling and chilling read.

Since reviewing The Meg, I’ve watched a host of terrible shark movies I haven’t bothered to write about. Lowlights include John Pogue’s Deep Blue Sea 3 (2020), Ben Wheatley’s Meg 2: The Trench (2023), and Andrew Traucki’s The Reef: Stalked (2024), all of which provide ample evidence for the law of diminishing returns in film franchises. Meg doesn’t even deserve its 27% on the Tomatometer; how The Reef and Deep Blue Sea achieved 71% and 79% respectively is completely beyond me. (Perhaps the Tomatometer isn’t as reliable as I thought.) I have yet to see Matthew Holmes’ Fear Below or Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals, both of which were released this year and come highly recommended, but both of which raise immediate reservations. Fear Below looks very similar to Christian Sesma’s Into the Deep (2025, 27%), which deserves dishonourable mention with the three franchise films, and Dangerous Animals is being marketed as ‘shark plus serial killer’ (eye roll). I’ve also watched Martin Wilson’s Great White (2021), which can consider its 44% on the Tomatometer generous; Justin Lee’s Maneater (2024), a well-earned 17%; and Joachim Heden’s The Last Breath (2024, AKA Escape from the Deep), with a very generous 30%. Yes, filmmakers keep churning (chumming?) them out and I keep lapping them up. I blame Jaws. (For both the churning and the lapping).

One thing that has become tiresome over decades of watching movies in what is now called the Sharksploitation genre, much more so than the appalling use of CGI in most, is the way in which they all replicate and reinforce the (hu)man versus nature trope. I’d have hoped that by now, with nature collapsing all around us, this might seem a little too twentieth (or even nineteenth) century to continue to appeal to audiences. This doesn’t just apply to Sharksploitation, but to many other contemporary films and franchises, such as, for example, Baltasar Kormákur’s Beast (2022) and the Jurassic Park (now Jurassic World) media moneymaker. Jurassic World Rebirth, the seventh film, is due next month and will no doubt involve plenty of land, sea, and air lizard mincemeat. Though I won’t be around to witness it, I also wonder if by the time Jaws’ centenary comes around, the orca won’t have replaced the shark as our favourite cinematic sea monster. Orcas are much bigger and much clever than sharks, hunt in pods, and are increasingly encroaching on human-infested waters as ocean temperatures rise. They do look like they’re smiling rather than snarling when they open their (immensely strong) mouths though, which probably doesn’t make a lot of difference if you’re in the water with one but might make them less likely film fodder. I leave that for the future...in the present, it’s time to revisit the past with (yet) another viewing of what might just be Spielberg’s best.