https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/herocomplex/la-et-hc-jaws-original-review-20150619-story.html

Dreyfuss gives the liveliest and most sympathetic performance. Still, the plot forces his character to swing unrealistically between brilliant insight and surprising naïveté.
Eventually, the three men head out to sea in search of their Nantucket “Moby Dick,” and this is where the movie truly comes alive. The adventure at sea is tense and expertly handled. Real sharks blend seamlessly with the mechanical model, creating convincing terror.
The special effects are credited to John M. Dwyer, with real shark footage shot by Ron and Valerie Taylor. Cinematographer Bill Butler clearly had a demanding task, while Rexford Metz handled the underwater photography, including a memorable shark-cage attack on Dreyfuss’s character.
Steven Spielberg, still young at the time, again shows a remarkable talent for staging large-scale action. Both he and the script are far less successful with close human interactions than with man-versus-shark conflict. Intimacy is not yet his strength.
The ending is pulp-style hokum, seemingly designed to reassure audiences that everything was just gory fun and the nightmare is over. Still, it wouldn’t be surprising if “Don’t go near the water” became a real-world motto that summer.
Like Earthquake and The Towering Inferno
, the fear isn’t erased by a happy ending.
Traditionally, we’re told that witnessing tragedy and violence purges us of fear. The Grand Guignol theater in Paris once believed fake blood and exaggerated horror turned shock into entertainment.
After Jaws, however, you’re left wondering what exactly was purged—and how much it now takes to entertain us.

From the start, the film feels like a carefully calculated commercial project.
One giveaway is how stubbornly the main characters refuse to come fully alive as real people.

Despite Scheider’s intense performance, much of this plays like broad, obvious melodrama. Richard Dreyfuss appears as a wealthy scientist whose childhood experience led him to become a shark expert.
Robert Shaw plays the local shark hunter, half-mad and obsessed—a poor man’s Captain Ahab who survived wartime shipwrecks and now wants to wipe out sharks entirely.

Hamilton’s mayor is a caricature of greedy short-sightedness. Shaw’s character, though colorful—scraping fingernails on a chalkboard, boiling shark bones, singing sea chanteys—behaves in ways that serve suspense rather than psychology.
His actions range from clever to suicidal, but they don’t even reveal a consistent madness.

The opening sequence is excellent: an underwater camera moves swiftly through the depths from the shark’s point of view, accompanied by the ominous bass notes of Jaws’ John Williams score. It promises something dark and suggestive.
An abrupt, jarring cut then takes us to a beach beer party, setting up the shark’s first victim. The tension rises again as we imagine the evil lurking beneath the calm, moonlit surface of the water.
After that, the story shifts between land and sea. Peter Benchley’s story, adapted with Carl Gottlieb, centers on Roy Scheider as a police chief who fears the ocean and tries unsuccessfully to close the beaches. He faces opposition from the town’s merchants, led by Murray Hamilton.
A reward for killing the shark brings out a comical fleet of amateur hunters.

Even the mature are apt to be jolted harder by “Jaws” than by the earlier jeopardy films.
Violence done to the helpless, always the hardest to watch, is here compounded because the victims are in the water, an alien environment, demanding and potentially dangerous at best. The inability to flee or fight back, as in a nightmare of paralysis, is real and only too easy to identify with.
It sounds, all of it, like a backhanded compliment for a potent and well-made movie.
But while I have no doubt that “Jaws” will make a bloody fortune for Universal and producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown, it is a coarse-grained and exploitive work which depends on excess for its impact.
Ashore it is a bore, awkwardly staged and lumpily written.