In Awe of Jaws

Why are there so few good shark movies?

Some kids won’t shut the fuck up about dinosaurs. I’m proud to say I wasn’t one of them. I conserved my syllables for more important topics. As a boy, I wouldn’t shut the fuck up about sharks.

As you know, all little boys stereotypically pick either an apex predator or a type of large machinery to get obsessed with. They’re basically the same obsession, for what are trucks, trains, and tanks if not the apex predators of machinery. I chose sharks and proceeded to cultivate a monastic devotion to them. In the pre-Wikipedia era, this required reading dozens of books and watching every shark documentary I could find. I set out to memorize everything I could about shark species, assuming I’d someday need to know all this information.

I’m still waiting for that day, but in the meantime, I learned about the deadliest shark species in order: Great White, Tiger, and Bull sharks. I also found out which ones look scary but are actually harmless, like the Sand Tiger, also called the Gray Nurse Shark, and Hammerheads. Some sharks have amazing tools, like Threshers, which use their long tails to stun fish, and Saw Sharks, which wield their serrated noses to wreak havoc. Then there are the ones that just look cool—seriously, Google "Goblin Shark." I researched the fastest sharks, like Makos, which can swim up to 60 miles per hour in short bursts, the longest-lived species, like Greenland Sharks that can live for 250 to 500 years, and the largest of them all: Whale Sharks.

So imagine my glee when my parents told me there was a blockbuster film (that literally created the term blockbuster) all about a killer shark. We flew down to Front Row Video on Solano Avenue and rented it right away. Seeing Steven Spielberg’s 1975 classic at the tender age of eight it was love at first bite. Everything from the score to the iconic lines like “you’re gonna need a bigger boat” had me under the spell of Jaws. I was so enraptured by a shark on screen that I ended up rooting for the shark and felt heartbroken when it passed away in a tragic compressed air accident at the end.

Having tasted the high of a good shark movie, I needed another hit. I was overjoyed to learn there were multiple sequels to my beloved Jaws. So I ran back to Front Row Video and rented those. Here is what I learned right away:

Jaws 2: 2 Shark 2 Furious

At first I felt delighted. The shark is back, as is Roy Scheider as chief Brody. However, the core tension in the first half of the sequel isn’t Brody v. Shark it’s Brody v. Credibility. The whole town thinks he’s losing it when he keeps insisting another shark is nearby. Eight year old me nearly joined in their dismissal of him when he earnestly asks a marine biologist examining a whale carcass if sharks practice revenge.

Cooky fish theories aside, he keeps the film grounded in some genuine family drama, constantly worried about his sons who just want to head out on sailboats and cruise around, looking for a good time. Jaws 2 has some fun moments and gets creative with ways for the shark to have new types of toothy conversations with the water sporting public. There’s a scuba diving attack, an explosive water skiing attack that resembles the “freak gasoline fight accident” from Zoolander, and lots of close calls on sailboats. The shark even eats a helicopter in one of the scarier parts of the film. As a whole, however, it’s not nearly as satisfying as the original. Watching it feels like eating an entire bag of Doritos, stimulating but not filling or healthy. This was my first taste of the idea that sequels aren’t earnest attempts to make me happy; they’re about trading my fandom and nostalgia for cash.

Jaws 3D: New dimensions of bad

Jaws 3D proved that even shark film franchises head to Florida to retire. This one centers around the adult Brody children (one of whom is played by a youthful but forgettable Dennis Quaid) working at a sea amusement park in Florida when some unexpectedly murderous new attractions sneak in and wreak havoc. There’s another waterskiing sequence. The Jaws sequels got really into water skiing and it’s already wearing out its welcome by this point. The central gimmick besides there being not one but two sharks afoot is early 80s 3D, which shows how unnecessary 3D is Hollywoods version of trying to make fetch happen.

Jaws: The Revenge: So bad you forgot Michael Caine was in it

How it feels to watch this movie (also how the shark dies in the end, no joke)

I knew this one was bad even as a kid. It’s a slow, sad, and lost take on wrapping up the franchise. For one, there’s very little shark in it, causing younger me to bemoan the lower body count. Ellen Brody is the star now, her husband having died “of fear” of Jaws, and one son killed by aforementioned shark while doing some routine dock maintenance over the holidays. After losing her first son in a poorly-lit attack, she travels to the Bahamas with her other son and the shark follows her over 1,000 miles out of spite. From its dreary opening to its groan-inducing final showdown, this is a highly forgettable and frustrating Jaws sequel. Also, the shark roars now for some reason which may drown out or mimic your groans of cinematic malaise. This review sums it up nicely:

It’s in that Mariana Trench of comically inept and soulless filmmaking where viewers must venture to find 1987’s legendarily risible Jaws: The Revenge. While the cookie-cutter simulacrum that was Jeannot Szwarc’s Jaws 2 (1978) at least boasted a mostly returned main cast, and the turgid stunt that was 1983’s Jaws 3-D had the novelty factor of three-dimensional jump scares, Jaws: The Revenge remains perhaps our purest example of profit-chasing, bottom-scraping studio calculation.

Asked if he’s ever seen it, star Michael Caine has been quoted as saying: “I have never seen the film but by all accounts it was terrible. However I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.”

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This dissatisfaction with the Jaws sequels sent me on a lifelong quest to discover why there are so few good shark movies. How on earth can this be such a tough genre to get right? Here is what I’ve learned by watching every shark movie I could get my hands on in the years since I first saw Jaws:

1999- Deep Blue Sea: Jurassic shark

Desperate for more shark content after devouring the Jaws franchise in a few weeks, I was delighted to hear that a new shark movie was headed to theaters near me. Billed as Jurassic Park in the ocean, the basic premise of this one is that scientists working on a cure to Alzheimer’s disease genetically engineer sharks in captivity to have larger brains so the scientists can extract more of their secret brain juice. The sharks, of course, outsmart their captors, escape, and start hunting down the researchers. The doomed research station starts flooding, becoming a nightmare setting for some claustrophobic set pieces. I still remember the chilling line from the trailer that made me demand that my parents to take me to go see it: “The sharks got smarter.”

All in all, Deep Blue Sea is a fairly lazy shark movie in a genre defined by lazy cliches, something I was aware of even at age nine. As the honest trailer cleverly notes, it’s more than just inspired by Jurassic Park, it unapologetically borrows huge elements of it, down to the approaching tropical storm, the new facility operating on a skeleton crew just before an important event, the genetically engineered super predators that surely can’t escape their confinement, and an iconic performance by Sam Jackson cut short by aforementioned super predators who have escaped their confinement.

Leaving the theater to LL Cool J rapping “Deepest, Bluest, my hat is like a sharks fin” (why did all 90s movies have to have a tie-in rap song?) I felt very confused about what I’d just seen. I had gotten more shark content, but at what cost?

2003- Open Water: 127 hours in a wetsuit

Open water is loosely based around a true story of a husband and wife. While on a scuba diving trip in Australia, they got missed in the dive boat headcount and ended up accidentally stranded at sea, presumably dying there. It’s not a shark movie as much as it’s a survival movie with sharks in it. The filmmakers do a good job making you feel the realistic frustration of being lost at sea gradually boiling over into full blown panic. Lots of close up shots with handheld cameras that rock and sway with the ocean swells make you experience their nausea and disorientation in real time. The sharks show up slowly at first and are more of a nuisance than a threat. Then as things start to unravel you understand just how screwed this couple is. You don’t want to look but can’t look away as they meet their final fates. It’s the type of grim, slow-building survival horror that is compelling to watch the first time but hard to muster up the motivation to rewatch.

2003- Red Water: Bullshit? No it’s a bull shark!

This made-for-TV shark movie is truly nothing special. The only notable part of this movie other than Coolio (of Gangsta’s Paradise and the All That theme song fame-RIP!) moonlighting as a villain is that the antagonist shark is something other than a Great White. Finally a fresh-water bull shark takes center stage. After watching dozens of white sharks get leading roles, there’s finally some diversity in Hollywood casting.

2009- Megashark vs Giant Octopus: Let them fight

It’s by The Asylum, which should tell you everything you need to know about if you’ll like it or not. Like a grilled cheese sandwich, the plot is summarized by the title. Two inexplicable and inexplicably large creatures rise from the depths, cause havoc, and then fight each other. However, the Asylum hadn’t yet perfected the so-bad-it’s-good drinking movie formula as they did with 2013’s Sharknado. This one is boring, predictable, has laughable effects, and the kind of acting that makes you pine for the exposition scenes in porn. Unlike Sharknado, this one is just bad-bad.

2010- The Reef: Capsized my expectations

Like Open Water, the Reef takes a gritty survival horror route through the shark genre. The premise involves a capsized sailboat and the occupants trying to figure out what to do next. Slowly, they began to suspect there may be a shark following them. Some fin stalking follows and builds to a predictable but gripping climax. The Reef was legitimately suspenseful, keeping the shark largely out of sight but building a growing paranoia about where it was and what it might do next. I watched this in my college dorm room and had a fun time.

2011- Shark Night: Light on shark fright, heavy on natty light, tits, and ass

Think my subtitle is heavy handed? Here is the first sentence of the Wikipedia plot summary of this film:

Jess goes for a swim in the lake. Her boyfriend scares her and takes her bra off. He leaves and she goes to retrieve it. She is then attacked and killed by a shark.

Of course this fratty shark movie drenched in the male gaze was from the same director as Snakes on a Plane. This one relies on a conceit that some creepy rednecks have put a veritable buffet of dangerous sharks in a Louisiana lake so they can prey on unsuspecting Tulane students while aforementioned rednecks film some viral content of the carnage. It’s our relentless hunger for shark content that’s the real villain! It’s a stretch even by shark movie standards. A highlight for me was seeing Chris Carmack aka Luke from the OC as one of the creepy redneck villains. I’m frankly disappointed the heroes didn’t off him by punching him into the shark-infested lake after yelling: “Welcome to the Bayou, bitch!”

2012- Dark Tide: Halle Berry’s second worst decision after “Catwoman”

In Dark Tide, Halle Berry takes a job that’s full of red flags purely for the money. She also plays Kate in this film, a woman who takes a job that’s full of red flags purely for the money. Now might be a good time to note this is the only movie on this list with a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

The premise: “what could possibly go wrong while free diving outside of the cage with Great White sharks.” The movie that follows is even worse. The opening scene centers around the “shock” of someone getting attacked while swimming with sharks and repeatedly touching them. It’s hard to muster up any sympathy for this character that you barely know dying after doing something inexplicably reckless. The rest of the movie centers around an insufferable wealthy British guy who pays Halle Berry 100,000 Euros to swim outside of the cage with sharks while she’s still in shock over her friends tragic, but clearly preventable death.

No one in this movie is likable or relatable. There’s more charisma in the B-roll of seals, dolphins, and penguins than in any of the human actors. The dialog is terrible and the actors appear awkward in every scene, like they’ve never been in a movie before and are confused by being stuck in this one.

The boat capsizes in a storm during the climax, and in the dimly-lit survival sequence that follows it’s truly impossible to tell what the hell is going on. This movie squanders what few moments of fear and drama it has through terrible pacing, bizarre cinematography, awkward performances, baffling editing choices, and a truly waterlogged script.

2013- Sharknado: We pre-gamed writing the script so you’d pre-game watching our film

In the event you missed this cultural touchstone of Obama’s second term, the premise, which stretches the definition of the term to say out loud, is that a freak tornado over LA picks up an armada of sharks and starts raining them over the city. Chaos ensues. This one has a washed up Tara Reid, bad CGI, and one of the silliest set pieces involving a flying Great White Shark and a chainsaw. Before we mocked Trump for asking if we could bomb a hurricane, let’s not forget that the protagonists of this movie proposed that idea first as a way to take down a Sharknado, suggesting that Trump may have gotten policy ideas from Sharknado. That’s about all you need to know.

For the record, this gem spawned a family of sequels including Sharknado 2: The Second One, Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!, Sharknado: The 4th Awakens, Sharknado 5: Global Swarming, and The Last Sharknado: It's About Time. It also spawned a somehow dumber spinoff: Lavalantula which requires flaming tarantulas to attack Los Angeles in a veritable orgasm of poor screenwriting.

I rewatched it during the depths of the pandemic and a friend I was with literally said out loud “oh I’m far too sober for this” and began chugging his to-go cocktail to get his head right. This is quite simply the apex of so-bad-it’s-good filmmaking as far as I’m concerned. Don’t take my word for it though. Buy a gratuitous amount of beer or wine, invite some friends over, and see for yourself.

2016- The Shallows: Shallow on plot, too

The marketing of “The Shallows” was clearly built around the assumption that audiences would rather watch Blake Lively’s bikini’d buttocks glide through the water than watch a shark fin do so and they’d put up with any amount of contrived shark shenanigans necessary to make that happen for 86 minutes.

As promised, Lively spends the majority of the film in a bikini. She starts off surfing before she’s knocked from her board by a very large and very rude shark that clearly doesn’t understand etiquette of the surf lineup.

Since a movie with her being in the water the whole time with a massive, miffed, and murderous great white would be very short indeed, the script needs a fix that it creates in the form of several “Deus Ex Sharkinas.” So she spends the rest of the film perched atop different floating objects that conveniently keep her just out of the sharks reach, leapfrogging between them like she’s playing a high-stakes game of “The Floor is Lava.” First it’s a whale carcass, then a rock before the incoming tide takes that away, then a buoy. It’s a sort of silly but effective conceit. The shark just keeps vengefully looking for her no matter what shelter she heads to next. So as long as you can accept that a monstrous Great White can in fact hold a grudge against Blake Lively in the way that Scarlett Johannson might, you can enjoy this movie. It’s a cleverly small-scale film, built around a taut runtime, minimalist cast, and razor sharp premise. The Shallows at times does an admirable job with the few cards it deals itself. There are some moments that are fun, suspenseful, and scary, which is why you pay admission to a shark movie. Shark movie endings are often underwhelming, however, and this one is a master class on that front. Finally forced to swim with the shark, she swims to the bottom and gets the shark to impale itself on some coral. I’m not making that up. That’s how the film ends.

Before it was an earworm Lady Gaga song killing Bradley Coopers marriage, The Shallows was a superficial shark film killing my modest expectations.

2017- 47 Meters Down: The genre gets the bends

Mandy Moore is inexplicably in this “what could possibly go wrong while cage diving with Great White Sharks” film that’s really cautionary tale about observing proper decompression protocols while scuba diving. Moore and her friend get trapped at the bottom of the ocean when their shark cage plummets to the sea floor. The rest of the film centers around them trying to get back to the surface without the sharks catching them. It’s a somewhat creative premise in a stagnant genre. If you turn the logical “that would never happen” part of your brain off it’s a halfway decent ride. There’s even a sort of clever twist at the end, though it’s basically a watered-down remix of the diabolical twist at the end of “The Descent,” which is an objectively better creature feature than this one.

2018- The Meg: Bigger is better, but better get Jason Statham just to be sure

I played hooky from work to watch this. I had just badly pulled my hamstring at an ultimate frisbee practice and needed something to take my mind off the pain. So we biked to AMC Bay Street on a grey Monday and watched the ultimate escapist romp of a monster movie.

Pluses were “Fast and the Furious” style action sequences with absurdly speedy submarines and getting to watch the biggest shark I’ve ever seen on screen mess stuff up.

Minuses were several “clearly pandering to the Chinese government” characters and plot lines and a confusing performance by Rainn Wilson.

At the end of the day, it’s a giant shark that has to be taken down by Jason Statham. What more do you want from a “turn-off-your-brain” movie?

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Of the fifteen shark films I can remember seeing (alcohol was necessary for some of them), I can count on my thumbs how many of them were actually good films. I’d argue that shark movies are so predictably bad that a sure indicator that a nighties or early 2000s cultural icon like Lou Diamond Philips, Coolio, Halle Berry, Tara Reed, Mandy Moore, or Chris Carmack is washed up is them starring in a one (Red Water, Dark Tide, Sharknado, 47 Meters Down, Shark Night, respectively). Now that the little boy obsessed with sharks has grown into a man, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why this is. This burning question has blossomed into my a unified theory of shark movies. Hold on to your drink, Neil Degrasse Tyson, let’s dive in.

The core paradox of a shark movie is how to make the threat of sharks real. First there’s the whole water thing. Except for Kevin Costner, the rest of us don’t in fact spend almost any of our time in the environment where sharks live. Even if we’re swimming near sharks, there’s the inconvenient truth hat they’re just not that dangerous. Mosquitos, it turns out are the most dangerous animal on earth to humans, killing about 750,000 people per year. Humans take the #2 spot, surprising no one, offing well over 400,000 of us a year. Sharks kill about ten people per year. That’s far fewer people than dogs (25,000), freshwater snails (2000), crocodiles (1000), and hippos (500). With stats like these, where’s the gritty hungry hungry hippo movie? Vin Diesel could star as the human or voice one of the hippos. Even ladders kill ten times as many people as sharks. Send me your script for a killer ladder film, though. It would probably be better than “The Happening,” whose villain turned out to be the wind.

If we are in water and realize there is a dangerous shark there, too, we’ll get out. So how do you keep up the suspense? You have to find contrived ways to keep people in the water, despite the presence of a shark. This is truly difficult to pull off successfully, which is why many shark films end up trapped in the uncanny valley between “so-bad-it’s-good” and “good.”

Just watch the parody trailer for Sharkpool, which diagnoses this contradiction perfectly:

The difficulty of realistically putting people in the path of murderous sharks means that logically one of the best possible settings for a shark movie isn’t some high-tech underwater lab, but the true story of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. After dropping off the bomb that helped end World War 2, the Indianapolis was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine off the coast of the Philippines. Only a third of the 900 men that went into the water survived, the rest dying of dehydration, exposure, and lots and lots of shark attacks. This story was even immortalized in the iconic monolog by the late Robert Shaw aka Quint in Jaws. Shark movies don’t obey the laws of logic, however, as I was disheartened to learn that this story has already been made into something resembling a movie, starring Nick Cage of all people. This flop of a shark-infested period piece was summed up by one reviewer as “ not exactly unwatchable but also completely not worthy of watching.”Ouch.

Sticking the landing on a shark movie is a near impossible task. The real question then isn’t why are there so few good shark movies. It’s how on earth did Jaws make a shark movie into a legitimately good movie given the hilariously glaring weaknesses of the genre? I’m far from the first to diagnose why Jaws is a masterpiece of cinema, but I’ll still share my contribution to the theory of the case.

Here’s what makes Jaws succeed where almost all shark movies flounder.

• A believable and compelling setting for shark terror. As discussed above, the setting of a shark movie really matters. You need a location where the sharks have a reason to be in the same terrain as the protagonists. This is what made Open Water, The Reef, and The Shallows land where Shark Night and Sharknado belly flopped (or do a wheelie depending on your taste in movies). Jaws is set on an island (strong start) that’s a tourist destination (better) and whose identity and economic livelihood is dependent on people going in the water (bingo!).

• An inherent social & political conflict that interplays with the shark conflict. The setting of Jaws also plays into some of the core conflicts of the film. The incentives of the town to make tourist dollars and the survival incentives to close the beaches are at direct odds for half the movie. The mayor is very reluctant to even entertain the idea of a shark because his salary encourages him not to until he ends up with blood on his hands from lax beach policies, which became a prophetic glimpse into COVID denialism to come. It’s also worth noting that this premise is stolen/borrowed from Ibsen’s excellent play “Enemy of the People.” In Ibsen’s version, a town whose hot springs are a major tourist draw discovers some bacteria in the hot springs, only to have the scientist who discovers this shunned as an “Enemy of the People” for being a Debbie downer during tourism season. Imagine Dante’s Peak but with baths.

• The shark is largely hidden from sight. Jaws established a counterintuitive principle of a truly good shark movie: you should show as little of the shark as possible, especially early in the film. A huge part of what makes sharks scary is how they represent the terror of the unknown. We are so out of our element in the deep, dark ocean that the idea of a large, toothy predator cruising around beneath us, is terrifying no matter how unlikely it may be. It’s wise then to let our fear of the unknown build for as long as possible by merely suggesting the presence of a shark, giving us little glimpses of it, but not showing the entirety of it until our fear is nearly unbearable. As is often the case with Hollywood classics, this stylistic choice was actually the result of creative constraints; the animatronic shark they built for Jaws barely worked for much of the filming process. Spielberg’s only choice was to get creative, substituting a fin, a yellow barrel, or even the iconic 2 note score in place of the shark he’d envisioned scaring the audience with. This is chronicled in the fun documentary about Jaws: The Shark is Still Working.

• Based on a book but knew what to change. Jaws is based on a best-selling book, but its strength isn’t good source material, but the narrative focus required to turn a good book into a great film. Like Peter Jackson did with Lord of the Rings and Spielberg later did with Jurassic Park, the genius of Jaws is actually knowing what to cut from a book (or add to it) to make it sing as a film. A surprising amount of Jaws the book isn’t about the shark at all. It’s about chief Brody’s disintegrating marriage. His wife ends up having an affair with Hooper. The shark dies anti-climatically at the end by just kinda drowning for some reason. While author Peter Benchley hated Spielberg’s exploding oxygen tanks, you have to hand it to him for knowing how to add drama to the climax of this story. The only dramatic climaxes in the Jaws the novel were inside of Mrs. Brody.

• Top ten film score by the master John Williams. You just can’t talk about Jaws without talking about the score. The Jaws score is arguably more important to the impact, identity, and legacy of the film than Bernard Herrmann’s legendary Psycho score is. Music is one of the most important components in any film for its ability to shape how you feel about what you’re seeing. Few directors understand this better than Spielberg, who collaborated with John Williams for some of his most beloved films. In Jaws, the score enhances the anticipation and terror of the shark and it also effectively stands in for the shark at key moments. Williams and Spielberg quickly get you to associate the sawing cellos and aggressive horns with the monstrous shark. Then then play with your expectations. They’ll make you fear the shark with music only to have it not show up. Then they’ll have the shark show up with no score to warn you it’s nearby, most famously in the “you’re gonna need a bigger boat” scene. The Jaws score does much of the heavy lifting for the emotional ups and downs of this film and is a perfect example of how to use music to make a good movie great.

Honest Trailers summed up the triumph of Jaws pretty perfectly, arguing that to make a good shark movie:

"You don't need fancy CGI... just one of the best living directors, a perfect cast and one of the best scores of all time... Wow, that's hard, let's stick with CGI... "

Just as noteworthy as the unlikely triumph of Jaws is our collective dedication to making and consuming more shark movies. Creature features are a truly fascinating subgenre of movies because of how compulsively we keep making them despite how truly rare a good one is. After the runaway success of Jaws (and it’s frustrating slew of sequels), Hollywood went all in on creature features, testing out giant snakes (1997’s Anaconda), snakes on a plane (2006, same name), wolves (2011’s the Grey), and alligators (2019’s Crawl) to name a few. Just this year, talented and handsome actor Idris Elba starred in “Beast,” marketed as Jaws on the Savannah. How did it turn out? Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus reads: “Want to watch Idris Elba fight a lion? The admirably lean yet ultimately disposable Beast is just the movie you're looking for.” We are truly addicted to making these movies. Yet if the results are so mediocre, predictable, and predictably mediocre, why do we keep making them with such fervor?

Maybe all of us are still the excited yet terrified child that I was when I first fell in love with Jaws: scared of these monsters, but also obsessed with them, cultivating a religious devotion to our own fear. As E.O Wilson once said:

“We are not afraid of predators, we’re transfixed by them, prone to weave stories and fables and chatter endlessly about them, because fascination creates preparedness, and preparedness, survival. In a deeply tribal way, we love our monsters.”