Jaws: The Movie versus the Book

Summary by Eric Dillon

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was a branch off the novel Jaws written by Peter Benchley . The Novel was written in 1974 receiving a best sellers award and therefore setting up for a movie just one year later in 1975, which soon invented the phrase “blockbuster”which simply is to gross over 100 million dollars. Since this was a highly publicized and successful novel Steven Spielberg was held to a high expectation for this movie to be an ultimate hit. The book and the movie have a lot of differences. The book gives you an all around synopsis on every character while the Movie gives you a breath description on what the character was about and more emphasis on the shark.

The title Jaws, is of course an innuendo referring to the shark. The opening credits start off by putting you deep in the treacherous waters of Amity moving along with an object that you assume is the shark but don’t officially know because of the camera position. The camera puts you in the depths of the water with the shark giving the viewer an extra edge when they witness a character jump into the water ignorantly. The fact that we know something that the character obviously doesn’t creates an uncanny feeling of wanting to warn or yell at your television. This type of cinematography is what enhances our viewing experience in a way that a book cannot do as effectively. On the contrary the books gives our main character, Chief Brody, a since of insecurity and worry while in the movie there isn’t enough time for us to sit and go into everyone’s background. Being able to cover more information and still keep viewer/readers attentive is something that is much more actively represented by a book. The most important sequences in the book sta...

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...k cant nearly provide the same fear as actually seeing the water and waiting for the shark to jump out and decapitate someone. Steven Spielberg also left us guessing because as the movie went on we got to see more and more of what the shark looked like until WHAM! The shark jumps out of the water and leaves at our seats to enjoy a blood-splattering finale. While reading the book I kept going and going waiting to get to a spin tingling conclusion and then all I read was how the shark suddenly floated away. I felt teased as if a girlfriend kissed you all over and left you there to stay with no action for the night! Part of it was the fact that I saw the movie before I read the book so my expectations were very high for the book seeing that Jaws is a classic. Overall I think Jaws is one of the few times that the movie actually beat the book by a very long shot.