I love shark movies as much as the next cinema-goer. But we should also reward high-quality film
Movie sharks were on some people’s minds last week, thanks to the release of the $150m blockbuster, The Meg, in which Jason Statham plays a traumatised oceanic rescue specialist who goes into battle with a 75ft prehistoric megalodon (sample dialogue: “Man v Meg isn’t a fight. It’s a slaughter!”). “What’s your favourite shark in culture?” asked the Radio 4 arts programme Front Row on its ever more frantically needy Twitter feed – and because I was badly in need of a displacement activity that day I, too, fell to thinking about giant fish with downturned mouths. Surely, I thought, there’s only one answer to this question. The one we all think of most fondly, because it frightened us so much and we all love to be frightened (assuming we’re able, metaphorically speaking, to get out of the water), is the great white beast that, to pinch from the critic David Thomson, gave a beautiful, skinny-dipping girl “the biggest sexual surprise of the 1970s”.
Boy, does Jaws take you back, and I don’t mean only to that moment when, sitting cross-legged in front of the television in your pyjamas you saw a severed, crab-crawled hand, and ran terrified from the room (as a child, I managed to see it all the way through only on my second attempt, and even then there was a sticky palm over at least one eye in the scary bits). Nor am I making reference to CGI, a wizardry still far off in 1975 (as every fan knows, three pneumatically powered prop sharks were made for the production – and yes, they do look a bit rubbish now).
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