That Great White shark in “Jaws” is much bigger in IMAX and even closer and scarier in 3D.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water 47 years after “Jaws” was released in the summer of 1975 — the movie that essentially created the summer blockbuster – it has returned this Labor Day weekend to scare you back on dry land again.
Under the supervision of director Steven Spielberg, Jaws has been enlarged for IMAX and converted to 3D presentations in Real D equipped theaters by SDFX Studios (until recently known as Stereo D).
(review continues after photo below)…
Actually, although the 3D makes you feel like you’re in the water when the camera is at the water line and when it is above Captain Quint (Robert Shaw) at the top of the mast in the crow’s nest looking down past him to the deck of his Orca boat below, it is most effective in the first half of the movie on the beaches and in the town of Amity Island in the numerous shots that Spielberg meticulously framed to have a person or object in the foreground — usually to one side — and another person or object of focus in the background, such as when Quint, Sheriff Brodie (Roy Scheider), and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) are standing in front of the giant tourist billboard with ominous graffiti. The depth and separation in these shots is palpable and makes you feel as if you are right there, even an observer in that town hall meeting of anxious business owners and politicians, and as if your are one of the sunbathers on the crowded beach, which now feels even more crowded and bustling. Those swimmers and that kid on the yellow air mattress beyond them who is about to get bitten, actually look like they are the many yards away from those of us on the beach as they really are.
In short, the 3D makes all these scenes feel much more real, and therefore give us a heightened sense of being there, thus drawing us much closer to the situations at hand.
(review continues after photo below…)
Because the movie wasn’t initially filmed with 3D in mind (this is not the cheese-y sequel of eight years later in 1983 called “Jaws 3-D” that was created with a different cast and director simply to try to cash in on the brief early 1980s resurgence of that 1950s 3D technology using carboard glasses with red and blue lenses), few of the shots of the shark in the second half of this 1975 original lend themselves to 3D, which is fine, since the movie still stands (er, swims) very well on its own without 3D, but now fills even more of your vision on an IMAX screen. That also helps make the audience more engaged, depending on the varying sizes of IMAX screens, all of which are larger than traditional screens, although Jaws has not been retrofitted to the taller and more square-ish shape of the biggest IMAX theaters.
(review continues after photo below…)
Perhaps it is because the 3D draws your eye to so much more in each frame of film – as with your daily vision in normal life — suddenly obvious to me for the first time in 47 years of of viewing this movie on the big screen in 1975 and on TV ever since, including HiDef Blu-ray — was the license plate that Hooper pulls out of the stomach of the tiger shark he is gutting on a dock near the beginning of the movie. When he tosses it over towards Brodie, you can clearly see now that it is stamped 007, and that it is from the state of Louisiana in 1973, the year the most recent previous James Bond movie at that time, “Live and Let Die,” was released, and the state in which much of that film took place.
(review continues after photo below…)
One final benefit of a 3D showing in a movie theater is that you will also see trailers of upcoming 3D movies in 3D, including the eye-popping trailer for the upcoming re-release of “Avatar” — the most pioneering and successful 3D movie of all-time — that will set the stage for the first of several 3D sequels coming starting this December 16, then December 2023, December 2024, December 2026, and December 2028.
— By Scott Hettrick