Jedidiah Rose’s review published on Letterboxd:
Jaws is masterclass cinema from one of the medium's great masters, here already at the top of his game early on in his career as he delivers the first true blockbuster and made generations afraid to go into the water with just the use of two musical notes and the ominous creeping dread that they implied.
In the 46 year's since the movie first opened to the public this movie hasn't lost any of it's potency in it's ability to ratchet up the fear in audiences, by happenstance of issues and technicalities in the production Spielberg was forced into making a movie about a creature without actually having one for the most part, and accordingly pulled out every little clever trick he could to have the implication of the shark be enough to scare the audience and I think that's why this movie endures to this day, in fact the most chilling scenes in the movie don't even feature the animatronic shark used and often it's merely enough for the camera to focus on the neverending foreboding sea we spend much of the movie on or near.
And special mention should go to one of the most awesome and memorable monologues in cinema history from the great Robert Shaw, whose recounting of the tale of the USS Indianapolis is as nightmare inducing as anything else in this picture.
Jaws is one of cinema's greatest and most beloved offerings as a medium for storytelling, it has been for nearly half a century and will be forever more and is still to this day one Spielberg's greatest pictures.
Just...avoid the sequels. (Which I can't due to my completionist sensibilities and need to log them as such but good god they're awful.)
