Why no other shark movie will ever match Jaws

You may have read my previous piece ‘The movies that influenced Steven Spielberg's Jaws’ but what about the shark movies and aquatic creature features that have come after Jaws?

There was the pretty dreadful ‘Orca’ (wonder how they came up with that title?) starring Richard Harris and Bo Derek. Harris plays a Quint/Ahab character who kills a pregnant Killer Whale and her calf and is then stalked by the male Orca who sets off on a revenge mission to kill Harris. Which is sort of, a bit like the idea behind Jaws: The Revenge where the shark is somehow meant to be related to the sharks from the other movies and goes after the Brody family. But to be honest, I try not to think about any of the sequels. For me, Jaws 2 just about works as a direct to video follow up.

Anyway, ‘Orca’ came out in 1977 and was an obvious cash-in, suffering greatly from a near total lack of originality.

This happens again and again as we move on from 1975.

When people make ‘shark movies’ they’ve basically looked at Jaws, seen that it was incredibly popular and thought ‘I know, lets make a shark movie cuz that’s what Jaws was and it made loads of money!’

But they always miss the point.

I’ll go to my deathbed arguing that Jaws was not a ‘shark movie’. It’s just not!

OK, so it had a shark in it and yes, that was the main thrust of the story - Bruce was definitely the McGuffin - but it was informed by greats from the history of cinema. It had all different types of films flowing through its veins - even though, when Spielberg read Peter Benchley’s novel, he threw out all the obvious subplots about the Mafia and Hooper and Ellen Brody having an affair - he wanted a straight A to Z story. The director was someone who understood that you need depth of character and story to make a movie truly great - even if it’s meant to be a big summer movie about a killer shark.

A more recent movie, ‘The Shallows’ does do something different by having a single character (and making the welcome change of having that character be a woman) and pits her against a giant shark as she tries to get back to shore. It’s a film about resilience, loss and family. It doesn’t sacrifice tension or character for lots of thrashing about and screaming.

There is one other movie that rose from the big budget B Movie depths recently and that was ‘The Meg’. It’s not a terrible movie, just not a terribly good one. It’s reasonably enjoyable but daft, an old fashioned ‘creature feature’ where you know exactly what’s going to happen and Jason Statham growls a lot and takes his shirt off. The basic problem with a movie like The Meg is that it, as with Orca, was inspired by one thing - Jaws.

There is no subtlety in The Meg, just huge CGI sharks that jump over boats and eat people. And the Jaws scenes are everywhere - popping up like yellow barrels.

There’s a dog (called Pippen, not Pipit), a kid who begs his mother to go out on the water again - not on a yellow lie-low like Alex Kintner but a big inflatable bird (again, the kid doesn’t die) and Jason Statham who plays a character that is one third Brody, one third Hooper and one third Quint, so I suppose you could say that the film makers did do something different. But only just.

The Meg could’ve been brilliant as a standalone proper big Shark Movie without any nods to its illustrious predecessor but sadly its producers chose to try the impossible and beat the original.

Words by Tim Armitage

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