Review of Jaws: 30th Anniversary Special Edition

Introduction

I`ve been dreading reviewing this R2 edition of Spielberg`s masterwork. I saw this movie as a mad-keen twelve-year-old movie fan the first week of its original theatrical run back in 1975, and it was a movie that had a profound effect on me. It scared me sh*tless. It also brought home to me the sheer power of movies and the extraordinary collective experience of watching a movie like this in a big audience - the theatre was a 2500 seater and it was packed out. If you think you know what watching movies is all about, you have to have experienced two thousand people taking a collective intake of breath when the head pops out of the boat.

I apologise to any spoiler-phobic people who may be upset by my dropping plot spoilers into this review, but frankly if you haven`t seen this picture by now, where the hell have you been hiding?

Jaws is, in my opinion, Spielberg`s finest work. It`s a thriller plain and simple, and one of the most effective pieces of storytelling to grace the silver screen. It predates Spielberg`s saccharine period and takes you on the kind of rollercoaster his earlier Duel takes you on. There are marked similarities between the two movies - irresistable force faced by out-of-depth hero, sudden death, shock tactics and glorious cathartic ending. Vintage-ist modern reviewers delight in rubbishing "Bruce", the rubber shark (which was state-of-the-art animatronics for the time) but they`re simply showing their ignorance. They would rubbish the original Kong for the animators` constantly mussing up the big ape`s fur every time they manipulated the figure. Some people are only happy when they`re whingeing about something other people love.

I still don`t like watching the opening of the picture. It had the same effect on me that the shower sequence in Psycho had on my Mum back in 1960. It has a truly visceral horror as poor Chrissie goes for a moonlight skinnydip and is suddenly attacked from below the waves by something that latches on to her and destroys her in a matter of moments. Her terror as the thing hauls her backwards through the water and drags her under is hard to watch, but worse is to come. There`s the beach attack with that iconic shot of Roy Scheider when the camera does a simultaneous track-in and zoom-out that gives you a feeling of a blood-rush-from-the-head. The old fisherman`s corpse bobbing out of his wrecked boat and the chumming incident which live on in the memory after you`ve watched the movie.

For me the stand-out moment isn`t a horror gag, it`s Robert Shaw`s delivery as Quint of the USS Indianapolis story. It`s a hair-standing-on-end sequence as the jollity of the scar-comparing match is suddenly replaced by the chilling tale of the fate of the Indianapolis. The story wasn`t part of Peter Benchley`s original novel, it was added by screenwriter Howard Sackler who had a crack at the screenplay before Carl Gottleib. Even Gottleib`s version of the telling in the script pales against Robert Shaw`s reworking of his monologue, which should for anybody familiar with the tale raise goosebumps.

Video

There is little if anything between this release of the movie and the 25th Anniversary version. They may well be the same transfer. The movie is shown in anamorphic widescreen 2.35:1 and the picture is magnificent. Averaging a bitrate of 7.0Mbps, the picture has been cleaned up very nicely and there are no technical artefacts to pull you out of the cinematic experience. Colours are spot on, contrast is fine and the movie looks as good, if not better, than when I saw it at the ABC in 1975.

Audio

The audio is why I was dreading doing this review. I`d heard a lot of pre-publicity about what was expected on the two-disc set. There had been some great extras on the previous 25th Anniversary edition of the movie, and some of the extras were going to be on the new second disc in expanded form. The space on the movie disc released by the extras would provide room for a DTS mix of the soundtrack. And that was where my problem lay.

I`d been disappointed by the 25th Anniversary Edition because some bright spark at Universal had decided to remix the whole thing in glorious Dolby Digital 5.1. Jaws had been released in 1975 with a bog-standard mono soundtrack, but that soundtrack had been absolutely iconic. Not only was the mono mix only available in French, German and Spanish on the disc, but the 5.1 mix substituted some of the key sound effects. Now, I know there are some people out there will say "so what", but for those of us who remember the whoop that went through the cinema after Brody`s "Smile, you sonofabitch!", that sound effect is very important. Like I said earlier, it`s cathartic. I`d expect a multimedia dictionary to use the clip to explain "cathartic". The substitution of the sound effect is as disappointing to Jaws fans as the loss of the Rebel Fanfare over the X-wing dive on to the Death Star in "A New Hope" is to Star Wars fans. It`s like beeping-out the "damn" in Rhett Butler`s dismissing of Scarlett. It shouldn`t be done. Adding insult to injury, the R1 version of this set includes the original mono mix - in English - but we don`t get it because Universal wanted the bandwidth for the 5.1 soundtrack in Czech and Hungarian. So we get four opportunities to hear this subwoofer sneeze instead of the original ker-pow! Gimme strength.

Features

The movie disc comes with full subtitles, but there aren`t any additional extras on the disc to maximise bandwidth for the DTS and multilingual soundtracks (the bitrate for the movie is roughly the same as the bitrate on the 25th Anniversary disc).

The second disc carries all the extras - the prize of which is "A Look Inside Jaws", the full-length version of Laurent Bouzereau`s nearly two-hour documentary which came in truncated form on the 25th A version. The doco is presented as a series of bite-sized (pun intended) topics which can either be played individually or one after another in "play all" mode. Disconcertingly, at first the doco keeps fading out at the end of each sound bite as if it had been structured to be "white rabbit" style inserts , but as it progresses it settles down into proper documentary mode. Curiously, one of Spielberg`s anecdotes about the sinking of Quint`s boat the Orca has an offending word faded out where the 25th A has it untouched, and yet the certification for the two versions is the same - a 12.

There are deleted scenes and outtakes. A word of caution on the outtakes for anyone expecting a few laughs - they include shots of Robert Shaw screaming and gargling blood in the scene where Bruce eats him. There is a short "From The Set" interview with Signor Spielbergo, "Shark Facts", an extensive (and I mean extensive) stills and illustrations gallery and a number of storyboard to screen comparisons.

Conclusion

One of cinema history`s greats. If you don`t have a copy you should, if you haven`t seen it, why not? People may whinge about the physical effect of the shark, but if you get pulled out of the movie by something like that, maybe you should give up watching movies and read a book instead. But then you`d probably bitch about the quality of your imagination.

"You`re gonna need a bigger boat."