Jaws (PG)
AFI Catalog; Amblin; Dread Central (Blu-ray/DVD); History vs Hollywood; iHorror; IMDb; PopHorror; Rotten Tomatoes; TCM; TV Tropes; Universal; Wikia; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Google Play; iTunes; Movies Anywhere; Vudu; YouTube

So, this came out in June 1975, about three months before I was born. (It's based on a 1974 novel by Peter Benchley, which I've never read.) I feel like I must have seen bits and pieces of this and/or some sequel(s) at some point in my youth, but I'm not really sure. It's one of those things you can't help but be aware of, whether you've ever seen it or not. What I can say is that I saw it in its entirety for the first time in 2017 (about two weeks before my 42nd birthday). And while I can't help but consider it a modern classic, it's still not something I'm able to really love. It was a good movie, but the kind of thing that if I didn't think of it as a classic before I watched it, I very well might have liked it a lot less than I did. And I don't really expect to watch any of the sequels. (The tagline from the second movie, "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water..." is something I associate with the franchise probably just as much as I do the iconic score of the first movie, by John Williams. But I don't have to actually watch the sequel to appreciate its tagline.)

Anyway, the movie is set in the small town of Amity (or maybe that's the name of the island the town is on, or maybe they both have the same name, I dunno). At the start of the movie, a young woman is killed by a shark, which we don't actually see. After that, the town's relatively new chief of police, Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), wants to close the beach to protect the public, but the mayor and I guess some other important locals are against that, because the town's financial survival depends on summer tourism. Well, one or two more people get killed, and then numerous people go out trying to catch the shark. Someone eventually catches a tiger shark, but according to an oceanographer who had been called in, Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), that wasn't the shark responsible for the killings. Eventually, Brody and Hooper go out on a boat with a very salty captain named Quint (Robert Shaw), who expects to receive a $10,000 bounty for finding and killing the shark (which Brody had determined was a Great White).

Well, I suppose there are a number of things from this movie that I'd consider iconic. I already used that word to describe the score (in particular, the music that represents the shark itself). And I'd say the way the shark is finally killed is iconic. And there's a line early in the movie, "That's some bad hat, Harry," that would later be paid homage to by a TV and film production company called Bad Hat Harry Productions. And the line "You're gonna need a bigger boat" is also fairly iconic. And there's probably other iconic stuff I'm forgetting (or never picked up on). But what's important is that it's a truly suspenseful movie, and the scares are more realistic than in most horror movies of any genre (or subgenre). And it's probably a better movie than I give it credit for in various ways. Certainly I think Brody, Hooper, and Quint are all good characters (even if I couldn't always make out what Quint was saying). They all felt like real people with real life experiences prior to the movie that made them who they are, now. Which is always a good quality for fictional characters to possess. But despite all that I found commendable about the movie, it's still not something I feel like I'd be interested in watching again. (And I feel bad about that.)