Stream It Or Skip It?

Two syllables have never had such a profound impact: dah-dum. Hence, Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story (now streaming on Disney+), a documentary marking the golden anniversary of Steven Spielberg’s career-defining, first-ballot hall-of-fame movie Jaws. Its making, and the big waves it made in the movie business and pop culture in general, are fairly well-documented, but is that going to stop any shark nut or film aficionado from watching director Laurent Bouzereau’s retrospective? Nah. The question is whether the doc can elicit some colorful commentary from a star-studded collection of talking heads, or turn up any new nuggets of info or anecdotes we haven’t heard dozens of times before.

The Gist: First of all, Bouzereau only solicits commentary from Cameron Crowe, James Cameron, Guillermo del Toro, George Lucas, J.J. Abrams, Steven Soderbergh, Robert Zemeckis and Jordan Peele, so I’m hesitant to call it a “murderer’s row” without De Palma, Scorsese and Coppola. Secondly, Emily Blunt is also a talking head, and if you’re wondering why, I’d respond by asserting that Emily Blunt is welcome anywhere, anytime, thank you. (Fact: Blunt has not only spoken openly about her obsession with Jaws, but she’s also the star of Spielberg’s as-yet-untitled 2026 film.) Regardless, we get a good frontloading of these faces, rightly praising Jaws and Spielberg. It was the first true blockbuster. It’s a perfect movie. It changed capital-E Everything. And we get a from-the-director’s-mouth Spielberg story: His first indication of how enormous this film was occurred when he hopped in a car alongside friends Albert Brooks and NYT film critic Janet Maslin, and cruised by a theater showing Jaws opening weekend, and the line was wrapped around the block. The ’70s were so IRL, weren’t they?

Next noteworthy moment: A Duel reference! Few things excite me like a Duel reference. Duel, in case you’re not aware, is Early Spielberg, a 1971 made-for-TV movie about a regular Joe in a car, being stalked by some maniac in a giant truck. Spielberg insisted on shooting it on location instead of in a studio with phony backgrounds, an aesthetic that informed his desire to shoot Jaws in the actual ocean. Incredible instincts from the young filmmaker, who understood the impact a location shoot has for a horror-thriller. But it was also naive of him to think he could wrap principal photography in Martha’s Vineyard in two months. Depending on who in this documentary you listen to, shooting on open water takes two-to-five times as long as it does on dry land. Filming dragged on and on. And, Spielberg adds, “On top of all that, 80 percent of the time, the shark didn’t work.”

Right. Bruce. That was the mechanical shark’s name. Not at all coincidentally, the same name as Spielberg’s lawyer. (The ’70s were so abundant with lawyer jokes, weren’t they?) Famously, the malfunctioning shark ended up having less screen time because it was so undependable, and it turns out that not seeing it so frequently actually made the movie scarier. So, a shadow, a fin, the cellos going dah-dum – the visage of the ragged-toothed jaws themselves are in your head, man! I’ll stop with the detail here. Don’t want to divulge all the gems. Jaws @ 50 chums the water and lures in family of late cast members and Jaws novel scribe Peter Benchley, shark biologists and conservationists, and some of the Martha’s Vineyard locals who were recruited for bit parts, all of whom contextualize various elements of the film, from its inception as a bestseller to the worldwide anti-shark crusade it inspired to the way it latched onto the public consciousness and never let go, like, I dunno, something that’s big and hungry and terrifying and bites a lot. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Honestly, Jaws @ 50 is a slightly more in-depth version of an extinct creature known as a DVD bonus feature. Bouzereau’s filmography is chock-full of those. 

Performance Worth Watching: I’m torn between the tingle I felt hearing Soderbergh say seeing Jaws in the theater 31 times made him the filmmaker he is today, and listening to Spielberg himself say his PTSD from making the movie manifested in recurring nightmares about working on the set forever. 

Memorable Dialogue: Spielberg on that last point: “Halfway through (shooting) Jaws, I couldn’t guarantee control over anything.”

Sex and Skin: None. Although you could get away with some of it in PG-rated movies (like Jaws) at the time. The ’70s were so pro-boobs, weren’t they?

Our Take: Few films deserve a feature-length retrospective, and Jaws is absolutely one of them. Spielberg’s struggles on the set are infamous lore, and hearing the stories from the (war) horse’s mouth is a lot of fun, as long as we properly acknowledge how the guy absolutely went through it for the sake of his art. His panic attacks and nightmares had never-before-and-never-since-type results: A movie that not only made piles of money, but became a high point of the art of cinema. Even movies that weren’t shark movies copied its methods, and it established the basic template of the summer-tentpole blockbuster (Lucas’ Star Wars built itself into a behemoth on the back of Jaws). It cemented a career for Spielberg that made him a billionaire, and earned him Oscars and – gasp – final cut. Final cut! You can count film directors with eternal final cut on what, maybe two hands?

None of this is particularly revelatory, mind you. Knowing that the shark was named Bruce and vulnerable to salt water (oh, irony, you devil) is remedial qualification for cinephile status. Some of what Jaws @ 50 digs up isn’t as broadly infamous – Bouzereau digs into some of the finer details of the casting process (some locally famous Martha’s Vineyards weirdos got screen time, and even a line or two), and the prickly rivalry between stars Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw is characterized as iron sharpening iron. It gives us a good sense of the stress Spielberg endured, and the old notion that suffering results in great art may be the recurring theme here, even if it’s not always true. Its thesis statement is revealed in the doc’s final moments when Zemeckis says Jaws “supercharged the language of cinema” – and at that point we realize that Jaws @ 50 has done a pretty good job of showing us why that’s true. The ’70s were so revolutionary for film, weren’t they?

Our Call: For once, a documentary’s reverence for its subject is inarguably justified. Jaws @ 50 can be formulaic, and it doesn’t break the mold of making-of docs. Even if it’s not quite a must-see, it’s nevertheless a fun watch for fans who appreciate a little rehash and newbs who want insight into a true cinematic benchmark. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.