Editorials
[‘Jaws’ Week] Is ‘Jaws: The Revenge’ Really That Bad?
Steven Spielberg’s classic film Jaws turns 40 today, you guys! To commemorate the event, we decided to take this last day of “Jaws Week” celebrate this tremendous feat for aquatic horror films (a sub-sub-genre I am a huge fan of). You read Chris Coffell’s thoughts on each film in the franchise yesterday, but I thought I would give the much-maligned Jaws: The Revenge another shot to see if it deserves all of its criticism. News flash: it does.
I don’t really know what I was expecting when I paid $3.99(!) on the PlayStation Store to rent this movie. It had been years since I’d seen it and I don’t remember it being as terrible as all the negative reviews and Razzie nominations (with only one win) suggested. Boy was I wrong. Jaws: The Revenge is a lazy, dumb and (most unforgivably) boring film that does not need to exist at all.
It’s difficult to discuss anything about Jaws: The Revenge that hasn’t already Rather than go over the issues of the film that are discussed ad nauseum (the roar of the shark, the fact that the shark has a vendetta and follows Ellen Brody to the Bahamas, etc.) and go into some of the other things that make the film so atrocious.
First of all, I would like to point out that Ellen Brody is an unstable woman, and needs to go to therapy. She is irrational and her decisions make no sense throughout the entirety of the film. There is no consistency to her character whatsoever. Also, the way she is written is kind of sexist (she only gets over her fear of the shark halfway through the movie after going on a date with Michael Caine’s Hoagie). She is given a sort of “shark sense” as well, which makes no sense. Basically, she can do exactly what Jake’s (Mario Van Peebles) tracking device can do and detect whenever the shark is attacking someone.
What is confounding about Jaws: The Revenge is that while the shark gets a lot of screen time, it doesn’t really do anything (and most of its screen time is in unnecessary dream sequences). The film can easily be divided into three parts: The first part is a drama following one woman’s grief over the loss of her son, the second part is a romantic comedy featuring Ellen and Hoagie (who spends most of the film sitting in his dinghy) and the third part is the actual “revenge” that the title refers to.
Director Joseph Sargent has stated that he wanted to make a quality film about human beings, which explains the lack of shark action and the emphasis on the romantic exploits of Ellen and Hoagie in the film. Much of Jaws: The Revenge doesn’t feel like an actual Jaws film, which is disappointing. Michael’s wife is also one of the strangest characters the series has ever seen, constantly having sex with Michael (seriously, that’s what she does during most of her screen time) and discussing it with Ellen.
Oh God, the dialogue. It’s the textbook definition of cringeworthy. There’s a moment where Michael and his wife are having a fight while she holds a blowtorch and he actually says (I swear I’m not making this up): “I’ve always wanted to make love to an angry welder. I’ve dreamed of nothing else since I was a small boy.” What. The. Fuck. Also, in the climax of the film, Michael asks his mother why she went after the shark. Her response? “I had to do it! There was nothing else to do!” Um, how about you just don’t go in the water? Which is what you have been telling everyone to do for the whole film. On his dancing date with Ellen, Hoagie states that he has two right feet. Ellen’s response? That it’s alright, because she has two left ones. Ugh.
The body count in the film is surprisingly low. Only two people get killed by the shark (three, if you count Jake’s death in the theatrical version of the film, which I don’t). The character motivations also don’t make much sense. The film seems to completely ignore Jaws 2 and 3, since Michael is still totally cool with going in the water, despite facing a great white shark 3 times before (there needs to be a happy medium between Michael’s and Ellen’s reactions to their pasts).
There are several instances where people know the shark is in the water, yet they insist on practically hanging over the edge of the boat (looking at you Sean). There’s a moment towards the end of the film where Hoagie lands his plane in the water so he, Michael and Jake can swim to the boat. Ellen goesThe list goes on and none of it makes any sense.
Anyway, this is my long harangue on Jaws: The Revenge. As many of you know, I can sometimes be too kind to bad movies, but there’s really no defending this one. It’s not even entertaining to watch. Being boring is the film’s biggest crime (and it commits many). What do you think of the film? Do you actually enjoy it? I confess, out of all the sequels, I have an unabashed love for Jaws 2, and I legitimately think it’s a good film. To celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Jaws, let’s discuss the franchise’s up(s) and downs in the comments below!
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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