Phydeaux50 — 9 years ago(October 30, 2016 07:02 PM)

Pretty much nailed it.
HERES A QUESTION that even the most argumentative film-nerds would barely bother to debate: Whats the greatest shark movie of all time?
The obvious answer, of course, is Jaws, Steven Spielbergs 1975 blockbuster about a working-class cop (Roy Scheider), a rich nerd (Richard Dreyfuss), and a perma-soused lunatic (Robert Shaw) who board a dilapidated boat and head out to kill a large fish by I dunno, poking it to death, maybe? (Jaws is my favorite movie, and Ive likely seen it more times than Ive seen the actual ocean, but Im still not sure those three guys had a well-thought-out plan for offing that thing). For more than 40 years now, Jaws has stood as the standard-bearer of shark movies, an honor that remains unchallenged by neither the films three sequels, nor by the numerous knock-offs it inspired, like the Italian-produced non-classic The Last Shark. When Blake Livelys shark-pursuit drama The Shallows opens today, pretty much every review will inevitably invoke Jaws, for better or worse.
But thats an unfair comparisonin many ways, Jaws isnt really a shark movie at all. Yes, its about a shark that is very, very good at being a shark, and it has one of the most hoot-inducing fish-bites-flesh scene of all time, when the creature drags Shaw into the sea, savoring each bite as though it were chomping on a chum-soaked stogie. But there are long stretches in Jaws in which the titular hunter disappears, and the movie transforms into a sharp examination of the petty, sometimes predatory behavior of the people on land: The way they favor their own bottom lines over the lives of their neighbors; the way they try to out-alpha-male each other; the way they allow their class differences to bubble to the surface. Jaws is actually one of the greatest human movies of all time, and to simply think of it as a shark-flickeven the best shark-flick everfeels reductive. It belongs in its own category altogether.
So if you take Jaws out of the running for best-shark movie, whats left?
https://www.wired.com/2016/06/deep-blue-sea-celebration/
All the little devils are proud of Hell.