So the last new-to-me movie on the AFI list is also the next movie for me on the extended S&S 2022 Great Movies list at #104. Synergy!

So obviously this is a movie that’s extremely well-known, kinda the prototype summer blockbuster movie — back in the ’80s, when summer blockbusters of this type were looked down on, you’d often see people say that Jaws and Star Wars ruined cinema. But notably, even the people saying this would say that both of those movies were themselves very good, and it was their imitators that sucked.

And… yeah, this is pretty good. I was actually surprised by how amiable and lowkey it is. I expected this tense, horror-adjacent kind of thing, and while there is some of that, it’s mostly a rural sheriff in a vacation town being annoyed at the venal mayor doing stupid shit, and then a big boat trip he takes with two weirdos (an extremely young Richard Dreyfuss being one of those) to go hunt down the shark.

The boat trip is where the movie is most interesting, as they try to harpoon the shark so they can tow it to shore, but — famously enough that literally everyone knows this — their boat turns out not to be big enough to manage this, and shit gets tense before Chekhov’s air tank is deployed.

One thing that surprised me about the movie is John Williams’ music. Obviously when you think about Jaws, you think about the main scary theme, and I expected most of the movie’s music to be like that. But you know how I was saying above that it was more amiable than I was expecting? Well, some of that is doubtless due to the music. Williams is working here in his swoopy strings mode, and it has a cheery vibe that would fit in with Harry Potter or the early bits of Jurassic Park. Not what I was expecting, for sure.

Even beyond the music, this is so clearly a Steven Spielberg movie stylistically — and so clearly part of that summer blockbuster genre — that it feels almost timeless. Very little beyond some of the clothes makes this feel like a movie from a half century ago. You could change almost nothing and release it again this summer, and it’d feel reasonable.

Except for one thing, which is that when the shark is onscreen, it looks stiff and rubbery, due to the part where they weren’t doing complex CGI back then, so just had some kind of giant puppet thing. On the one hand, being able to make the shark dynamic and viscerally alive would definitely have improved the movie; but on the other hand, if they could make the shark look good, maybe the movie wouldn’t have spent so much time with the shark lurking offscreen as an unseen presence, which would be to the movie’s detriment.

Anyway, if you somehow haven’t seen this movie, it’s a pleasant little popcorn flick and essential cultural literacy. It belongs on the AFI list.