JAWS!!!!!!!!!

Jaws is the awesome tale of an epic battle between men and a primordial beast. When an absolutely gigantic Great White shark starts preying on the beaches of Amity Island, a summer beach community that seems based on, and was filmed at, Martha's Vineyard. The greasy mayor of the town won't let the wet behind the ears sheriff close the beaches, his greatest source of income, to cut off the shark's food supply. After a few local fishermen's misguided attempts to catch the monster, three men, the sheriff, a salty fisherman, and a shark enthusiast from the "oceanographic institute," set out in what is perhaps too small of a boat to search and destroy Jaws.

This movie is epic. The first scene is epic, the middle bits are pretty epic, and the end is certainly epic. It also isn't a crappy movie. In fact, this movie is considered to be the dividing line between New Hollywood, and the blockbusters that dominated the late seventies and really, continue to dominate movie theaters today.

What is a blockbuster you ask? Technically, a blockbuster is a film that makes over $100,000,000. Jaws was the first movie in history to make over 100 million. But, I want to use the term to mean a film that was created with the intent of making huge amounts of money in the box office. These movies, in my elitist opinion, can easily turn into high budget monstrosities designed for mass appeal. Let's look at the top films in the box offices right now. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the latest installment in a franchise started by Lucasfilm and Spielberg in the eighties, has fallen behind the Sex and the City movie, which I don't want to profane because I will probably see that tonight but is an obviously artless ploy for box office success. Ironman, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, Speed Racer, Made of Honor, it is summer so pretty much all of the movies out now are "blockbusters" in the sense that they don't seek to advance the art form, only to gross as much money as possible. Jaws was followed by The Omen and Star Wars, two movies that, especially Star Wars, made just oh so much money.

Jaws was a great, smart movie with a gripping plot and awesome action. It made so much money in the box office that studios started to want to make more and more and more movies with similar templates: relatable characters, lots of action, and at least one naked woman, like the thousand sequels Universal tried to make, including Jaws 2, Jaws 3-D, Jaws: The Revenge, and Jaws Unleashed (which is a video game but whatever).

All that said, I love Jaws, and anyone who hasn't seen it should watch it unless you are Emily, who refused to watch this with me, and have an actual, diagnosable phobia of sharks.
-Kamala