Review
JAWS: 30TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Universal, 1975
The marketing push behind the 30th anniversary DVD release of Jaws is of a size not usually seen outside the Star Wars galaxy. I love Steven Spielberg’s classic shark blockbuster, but this version proves there really is nothing new under the sun.
You can’t fault the legendary score by John Williams, the fantastic performances by Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw, or dialogue so good that it has become part of the pop-culture vernacular. However, the much-ballyhooed two-disc DVD is just a slightly modified and repackaged version of the old edition.
The big selling point for the DVD is two "previously unreleased" documentaries on the making of Jaws. The older of the two is an eight-minute featurette filmed on the set of Jaws by the BBC in 1974. Seeing a young Spielberg is interesting, but ultimately this doc offers more in the way of promotion than information.
The second documentary is a two-hour look back at Jaws, which merely adds extra footage to the existing one-hour doc available on the 25th anniversary edition. This begs the question, if it wasn’t interesting enough to make it in the film the first time, why should we care now?
On top of that, the new version lacks the shark trivia and the Jaws quiz available on the older disc. If you don’t already own it, now might be the time to buy, but don’t get suckered by this new edition if you already have the old one. |
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