Some Thoughts On JAWS In Imax

  This will be a quicker, bloggier bit, a brief reaction to my screening and then a sort of brief review of the movie. I saw "Jaws" in my local AMC Imax theater on Saturday for $3.20. The promotion that movie theaters were doing for very cheap tickets in all formats was neat. I'd actually never seen a film in Imax there, because I was pretty confident that the presentation wouldn't be impressive enough to pay extra for it, and I was definitely right on that instinct. The screen was a little bigger than others in that building but nothing special, and the sound was squarely in the realm of "fine, I guess". The movie specifically looked... fine - it's a really good transfer outside of a few (I'm talking literally 3 or 4) establishing shots that were noticeably lower quality, but it seems so silly and pretentious to hype up a 40 year old movie playing on a fancy format that it wasn't made for. I'll balance that by saying the famous shooting star blew me away; the color contrast of the red streak against the dark sky was very impressive. I was delighted to see "Jaws" on the big screen. Also, asking for an extra $5 per ticket because it's on the biggest screen is absurd to me. 

This shot was striking.

 So how does the movie hold up? Incredibly well, as if anybody was waiting on just one more opinion. I think that most people think of Spielberg as a storyteller and an effects maestro, and he is those things, but the most impressive aspect about his "West Side Story" is how consistently mind-blowing the blocking is. Where the actors are moving when and how they're framed is so brilliant in that. And yeah, I noticed how clever the blocking is in "Jaws" too. There's so many "iconic" shots that it can become easy to not realize how great it looks in the more standard moments. Yes, the zoom when Brody (Roy Scheider) sees the shark is wonderful, but what makes it so wonderful is that it's the payoff to a full minute of panicked cross-cutting. The jump scare of the corpse works, even though it shouldn't with how fake the corpse looks, because of how much restraint the movie has showed on its scares before that moment. And there's some great subtle shots too. The first half of the movie has quite a few busy walk-and-talk scenes, and one really impressive scene which takes place on a large raft that moves into the sea a bit and then back to shore. Spielberg only shoots it from the one head-on angle, and the background moves, and you don't even realize until the mayor says to bring Brody back to land that the raft is already there. Also great is the scene where Brody and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) convince the mayor that the shark is still in the sea. You have a long take with 3 actors all talking over each other, and they're all shuffling around, and it's clear and easy to follow while at the same time being dynamic and energetic. Cameras may have gotten better over the years, but I'm not sure anyone in the summer blockbuster business has gotten better at staging dialogue scenes. If this movie was made today, there would be a whole lot more shot-reverse shot and a whole lot less of two people arguing to each other's face. The movie gets decent mileage out of the 'characters metaphorically trapped while actors literally stand behind bars' that Spielberg used again in "West Side Story". Every few minutes I found myself getting excited over the camerawork, and that's what the magic of the movies is at the end of the day.

 Scheider and Dreyfuss are great of course. The rich snobs vs working class snobs bit that Hooper has with Quint (Robert Shaw) works because the bonding the two of them have works, both literally when they compare scars and metaphorically, with Quint's left-to-die by his superiors war story lining up pretty well with the mayor leaving Brody and Hooper to risk their own lives and fend for themselves. I feel that there's no need to attach a scholarly metaphor to "Jaws", because decent people of all backgrounds being screwed over by The Man is right there in the text. When your thriller looks good, sounds good (thank you John Williams), has well fleshed out characters and a meaningful theme, the bit where the shark isn't actually realistic by any standard is incidental to the film's success. I don't need to believe that the shark is "real" when the blood gushing in the water looks real, and when 2 hours of brilliant camerawork and editing has me primed to believe just about anything. "Jaws" is amazing, dazzling, infinitely rewatchable, and absolutely worth its reputation.