HOW JAWS CHANGED THE WORLD touches on most of what happened when the movie hit theaters back in 1975, but it's a cursory look at the phenomenon at best. Not unlike the Orson Wells 1938 radio broadcast of WAR OF THE WORLDS, JAWS panicked America. (We're nothing if not a Fearful nation...) As The Wife pointed out to me: "The Shark has such a powerful Presence that one can't help but be in AWE of it." The main reason for the brevity of what we DO see in this documentary is that it's shoehorned into a one hour time slot, alongside seemingly hundreds of commercials; there simply isn't TIME to go into much detail about the effects of this movie on society. (On a related note: last summer, we had a total of eight shark attacks in this area; so far this summer, we've had three. 1975 wasn't the ONLY "summer of the shark.")
2 Reviews
Fun Documentary for Shark Fans
Michael_Elliott19 August 2012
How 'Jaws' Changed the World (2012)
*** (out of 4)
Discovery Channel's 25th Anniversary of Shark Week produced this documentary that takes a look at both the good and bad that came from the movie JAWS being a huge success. We start off with a brief introduction to both the book and the movie and then the documentary turns to what happened in real life. There's talk about all the bad stuff that happened after the movie was released and the majority of this deals with people who wanted to become shark hunters and this caused the population of the creatures to go down. There's also discussion of the fear that the movie put into people and there's talk about why it didn't need to happen. The good stuff is also talked about and this here includes people who wanted to study sharks after seeing the movie and why so many different places started to receive money and grants to do so. Overall this really isn't a bad documentary but I think it's going to appeal to shark fans more than JAWS fans. You get some pretty interesting stories from people who actually work with sharks daily and this includes Peter Benchley's wife Wendy who now tries to save them. Rodney Fox, the man who shot the underwater footage used in JAWS, is interviewed as well.
*** (out of 4)
Discovery Channel's 25th Anniversary of Shark Week produced this documentary that takes a look at both the good and bad that came from the movie JAWS being a huge success. We start off with a brief introduction to both the book and the movie and then the documentary turns to what happened in real life. There's talk about all the bad stuff that happened after the movie was released and the majority of this deals with people who wanted to become shark hunters and this caused the population of the creatures to go down. There's also discussion of the fear that the movie put into people and there's talk about why it didn't need to happen. The good stuff is also talked about and this here includes people who wanted to study sharks after seeing the movie and why so many different places started to receive money and grants to do so. Overall this really isn't a bad documentary but I think it's going to appeal to shark fans more than JAWS fans. You get some pretty interesting stories from people who actually work with sharks daily and this includes Peter Benchley's wife Wendy who now tries to save them. Rodney Fox, the man who shot the underwater footage used in JAWS, is interviewed as well.
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