The Best Adventure Movies: Jaws

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Outside Magazine, June 2005

Outside Goes to the Movies
A Perfect 10
Jaws

By Steven Kotler & The Editors

1. Jaws (1975)
There are more than 460 species of shark, but only one Jaws. This monster will forever haunt our favorite ocean sports, and for that we're still a little ungrateful. But as cinematic fright trips go, Jaws remains the most gripping. It's perfectly paced to provide maximum buildup for every electric shock, luring you into occasional laughter but never letting you relax.

For better or worse, Jaws also upended Hollywood. Directed by a young Steven Spielberg and based

"One of my favorite movies is The Shipping News, which I watched during a long-distance voyage. It's a great story about how life goes on even when the world seems to have fallen down around you."—Ellen MacArthur, Around-the-world solo-sailing record holder

on the best-selling book by Peter Benchley, this is the film that launched the summer blockbuster. Made for just $12 million, it grossed an unprecedented $100 million in its first three months, and it succeeded wildly because it was a horror movie with a believable beast that reminded us of our proper place in the food chain. As ichthyologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) announces after examining the film's first victim, a young woman who died while skinny-dipping at night, the thing that killed her "wasn't any propeller, it wasn't any coral reef, and it wasn't Jack the Ripper. It was a shark."

And it was a lunker, too. As the movie unfolds, we learn that a 25-foot "rogue" great white has set up chomping grounds in the waters off a popular East Coast vacation island. It's up to Hooper, the embittered shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw), and Police Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) to destroy it. By not even showing us the shark for the first hour, then rarely showing it again until the finale, Spielberg cultivates the primal terror in our imaginations, teasing it to a climax with John Williams's menacing score. We're so cranked up that by the time the monster fully emerges, it's almost a relief.

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