As a child, I collected so many shark jaws that my mom disappeared them all one day while I was at school because my room allegedly smelled “fishy.” I suspect it was my general fixation on the beasts that didn’t pass the sniff test.
When I first saw “Jaws” at age 8 — more than a decade after its 1975 release — it exploded my already shark-obsessed young mind. I should have been more scared, but instead I was captivated. When I saw “Jaws 2,” not long after, it spawned another great love of mine: monster movies, with all of their suspense, horror, surrealism and spectacle.
The original, which was directed by Steven Spielberg, is of course a monster movie, too — probably the best monster movie ever made — but it was also a masterpiece that changed cinema. But “Jaws 2,” released in 1978, was not trying to be anything but a monster movie. On that score, it’s a horrifying success and a feat in its own right — a sequel that delivers more of everything I want (which explains why I rewatch it every summer): more shark, more shark attacks, more screaming teens.
The film takes us back to Amity Island four years after the events of the first movie, with some of the same cast members returning. Roy Scheider is Martin Brody, the beleaguered police chief who once again is fighting to protect the seaside town from another killer great white. Scheider plays him with full-tilt, man-on-a-mission madness. Lorraine Gary is Martin’s wife, Ellen, and is more present in the sequel, offering crucial balance to her frenetic, spiraling husband. And Murray Hamilton is Mayor Larry Vaughn. How the mayor kept his job perhaps requires more suspension of disbelief than the fact that another shark is terrorizing the same community.
Unlike the first film, which is known for perfectly executing the slow-burn buildup to its monster reveal, the sequel gives us the creature immediately after the opening credits, when it swoops in on two scuba divers photographing a shipwreck.
From there, we get exponentially more shark. We get it charred. We get it capsizing a helicopter. And mostly, we get it terrorizing a group of teenagers, including Brody’s two sons, out on the open ocean as their fun-filled day of sailing catamarans turns bloody.
The stakes are higher, the action is relentless, dramatic and convincing, and the special effects — especially those on the water — are far more ambitious. In many ways, “Jaws 2” set the stage for a future of grander, more daring sequences.
At the time, the young stars’ performances were criticized, likened to those in after-school specials or slasher movies. “The irritating and incessantly screaming teenagers don’t make for very sympathetic victims either,” a BBC review reads.
First of all, harsh. They are being hunted by a monster, after all. But also, the many actors in those scenes powerfully portray real fear. When the Brodys come across Tina (Ann Dusenberry) cowering in her catboat — in shock, shivering and white as a ghost after seeing her boyfriend dragged to the depths — she conveys to them what had happened by sputtering a guttural scream, “Shaaaark!” That wail is forever imprinted on my psyche.
The many scenes on the water were influenced in part by the early 19th-century Géricault painting “The Raft of the Medusa,” which shows shipwreck survivors struggling against the forces of the sea. “The intent was to get some of that into the movie,” Carl Gottlieb, who wrote the film with Howard Sackler, said in the 2001 documentary “The Making of ‘Jaws 2.’”
Spielberg didn’t direct “Jaws 2.” According to a biography, Spielberg said that “making a sequel to anything is just a cheap carny trick,” though he also told an interviewer that he passed in part because of the problems he faced making “Jaws”; the three mechanical sharks malfunctioned so badly, it nearly destroyed the film’s production.
“I would have done the sequel if I hadn’t had such a horrible time at sea on the first film,” he said. “I knew that when I was walking away from the sequel I was walking away from a huge piece of my life that I helped to create, but it wasn’t a hard decision.”
Stepping in for Spielberg was Jeannot Szwarc, a French director who in the 1970s had mostly worked on TV films and series like “The Rockford Files” and “Columbo.” Szwarc successfully managed to maintain the tone and atmosphere that Spielberg had created, and he did it under tremendous pressure.
The film had already been shooting with the director John D. Hancock, but it wasn’t going well and he was removed. With a hard and fast release date, Szwarc was brought in with just weeks to prepare.
“I’m very proud of it,” he says in the documentary. “The odds were extraordinary, the difficulties were immense,” but, he added, “it stands on its own, and it works.”
What helps give “Jaws 2” that blockbuster motion-picture polish is John Williams’s score, which captures the energy of the ocean, both the freedom and the dread of the unknown.
Williams had won an Oscar for “Jaws,” and he reconceptualized his iconic “dun dun” music for the sequel’s whimsical, bubbly sailing motif. The result is a score that is itself an artistic achievement. In place of the extended foreboding sounds of the first film, Williams created misdirection with a sweeping composition that turned on a dime. When scuba divers leisurely explore the underwater flora, they’re accompanied by a dreamy, lilting arrangement. Then the shark smashes into the scene. It’s a jump scare with a sonic shift to match.
The score also helped Williams finesse his approach to reimagining his own material. It was a process he would use for the many sequels he took on in the “Star Wars,” “Indiana Jones,” “Jurassic Park” and “Harry Potter” franchises.
In a featurette, Williams said he understood that theatergoers would expect the music of “Jaws” to return, calling it “part of the cast.” But he put the sequel assignment in context, part of “the great tradition” of signature music in Hollywood serials with Roy Rogers or the Lone Ranger.
In the featurette, Szwarc said that the film required Williams to compose broader and more varied music, and much more of it. Williams wrote a “youthful counterpoint to the shark theme that is always around when the kids are sailing,” Szwarc said. “It was very inventive.”
In the end, “Jaws 2” was a box office success and the first major blockbuster sequel. It was the most expensive movie Universal had yet made, but delivered the highest grossing opening weekend of all time up to that point — even beating “Grease,” which debuted on the same day, June 16, 1978.
If there’s nothing else you remember about the film, you almost surely know the tagline, created by Andrew J. Kuehn, a movie advertiser who helped revolutionize trailers that played before films, including those for “Jaws” and Aliens.”
Kuehn was also known for his smart writing, and his tagline for “Jaws 2” — “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water” — endures as one of the most recognizable and parodied in film history.
In his review of “Jaws 2,” The New York Times critic Vincent Canby noted that “until great white sharks learn how to fly or use automatic weapons or develop their powers of telekinesis, it would seem that ‘Jaws 2’ has pretty much exhausted the cinematic possibilities of sharks as man-eating monsters.”
Little did he know what was to come: Little did he know what was to come: “Sharknado,” “The Meg,” the new “Dangerous Animals” and many other shark movies so absurd, they make “Jaws 2” seem subtle.
Maya Salam is an editor and reporter, focusing primarily on pop culture across genres.
The post ‘Jaws’ Is a Masterpiece, but ‘Jaws 2’ Deserves a Legacy, Too appeared first on New York Times.
