It's a perfectly decent pulp page-turner, but virtually everything that's great about the film, barring the basic setup, was added later.fiddlesticks wrote:I guess I'm the only person who thinks Jaws the novel is superior to Jaws the movie. It's been a lot of years since I've read the former or seen the latter, and maybe the novel is poor for all I remember.
I remember it being eminently disposable padding - and retaining it would have wrecked the pacing of the film's second half. It might possibly have registered as being interesting in the original context because Quint is a barely-characterised cipher in the novel, but the film certainly didn't need it.But I've always been irked that Spielberg just shit-canned the whole Hooper and Brody's wife storyline, which I remember as the most interesting part of the novel.
Now that's just baffling - the heart of the film's second half is in the interrelationship between three very different characters. In fact, this is where the film is fundamentally superior to the novel, because Quint is properly fleshed out thanks to Robert Shaw's performance and John Milius's script additions (the Indianapolis speech).Without that as at least a subplot in the film, all you're left with is three not very interesting guys with no interrelationship (or character development) in a boat chasing a shark for an hour. Ho-hum.
