Of the summertime experiences, going to the beach remains almost ritualistic — as if by custom, the warmest days call for us to pack our coolers, lather up the sunscreen, and travel to some nearby body of water. It’s all cool and relaxing, a place for recreation and activity. But the water also sparks a host of questions. If it’s a lake, how deep is it? If it’s an ocean, how bad are its currents? And for any body of water, the age-old question: What’s in it? The water both invites and terrifies us. It has for centuries. And in American cinema, few films explore that dichotomy better than Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. In the film’s opening scene alone, the water is a place of potential pleasure for two giddy teenagers and a site of a gruesome, bloody tragedy. It continues to oscillate for most of the runtime.
Jaws may be the quintessential summer blockbuster, a movie obsessed with what’s lurking beneath the waves and how it challenges the humans above. But for all the flak it catches, Jaws 2 remains a worthy successor that’s just as invested in those concepts. Its efforts to maintain Spielbergian excitement — despite Spielberg himself relinquishing the director’s chair to Jeannot Szwarc — while digging deep into Jaws’ questions of family, masculinity, and hierarchy are commendable. And before the franchise became dead in the water with Jaws 3-D’s gimmicks and Jaws: The Revenge’s revisionism, Jaws 2 felt like a genuine effort at continuing a legacy.
The 1978 sequel follows Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Schneider) and his family spending another summer at Amity Island. Four years have passed since the events of Jaws, and with no recent shark incidents, many of the seaside tourist town’s residents have relaxed. Business seems better than ever, too — a new Holiday Inn resort just opened, tourists flock to beachside condominiums, and hordes of children sprint along the shorelines. It’s idyllic, with cinematographer Michael Butler capturing every colorful beach umbrella, white wispy cloud, and tope sandy slope.
Like its predecessor, Jaws 2 is focused on the beauty of its moment. The camera shoots wide, filling the frame with as much landscape as possible. Movements are smooth, elements are balanced, and characters look crisp and clear, encased by warm and sunny light. Sometimes there’s a glare on the horizon, cast off blades of grass and crests of waves. But most shots look perfect, like they could be mistaken for a painting.
And that’s where Jaws 2 finds itself in line with Jaws: both films create a picturesque environment but never let audiences get too comfortable with the beauty. How we see it, how we watch beachgoers, and how we explore Amity becomes uncanny because we know what exists alongside and inside this halcyon.
Part of this is owed to the quieter moments of Jaws 2. In an early scene, the great white shark swims in the bay at night. It’s not visible at first — we only know its movements by the slight shifting of boats. And when the shark does materialize, it’s almost indistinguishable from the water. It’s not clear how big it is, where its nose begins, and its tail ends.
But then its fin breaks the surface. The foreground shark fin is eerie, a famous symbol of incoming danger, a suggestion that something big and bad is under the water and out of view.
And the shark swims further, the fin glides against a background of beach houses and boats. It’s an interesting moment that places the shark and Amity in the same frame, connecting them both while disrupting how we previously saw the beach town. When the scene fades to the next day, a gorgeous and sunny morning, townies and tourists meandering around suddenly doesn’t feel as charming.
Jaws 2 plays with that division often. In one sequence, various groups of people enjoy beach amenities. A father and son lie buried in the sand with their toes poking out; a young girl does cartwheels; a man takes a picture of two women, trying to get them both in the shot. Here, John Williams’ score is light and bouncy, distracting us from reality. Then, we tilt up to Brody, who watches the water vigilantly from a tower, searching for any signs of a shark.
Watching the scene isolated, it’s not entirely clear which film it belongs to. In Jaws, Spielberg constructs sequences to evoke complications between the beauty of what’s on screen and the knowledge of a deadly shark nearby. And that’s often heightened by focusing on people — scenes where Brody’s son Mike mimics him at the dinner table, or people gossip and giggle while lounging on towels come to mind. In these scenarios, Brody and the audience know the horror of the shark, even if we become distracted for a moment, or, like other characters, downplay any concern.
Jaws 2 does all of that well, giving the impression that it’s wearing the robes of a Spielberg production. From its underwater title sequence and its jump scares to how it imitates the shark’s perspective, the sequel understands what made Jaws work and doesn’t reinvent the wheel. Rather, it imitates and copies, creating a parrot of a film that, for all intents and purposes, is just as enjoyable.
That’s not to conclude that the sequel doesn’t break the mold in some ways. For better or worse — probably the latter — the film shows far more shark than the original, although it scars it with a burn from a boat explosion, giving its face an otherworldly, grotesque look. It also pushes past Jaws’ interests in gender and family, developing a contentious relationship between Brody and his teenage son Mike (Mark Gruner). Brody struggles to control Mike, bringing into question his role as the masculine, fatherly figure.
For much of Jaws 2, the narrative explores this conflict along with a focus on teenage characters and their plights, antics, and potential romances. Mike, in an effort to spend time with his friends and spark a potential relationship with a love interest, disobeys his father’s command to avoid the ocean and sneaks out to go sailing. The teenagers he hangs with feel mostly nameless, but their activities are familiar. They spend their time talking about girls. A townie boy mopes that a tourist girl will never go out with him, while one couple spends most of their time rolling around in the sand and boats, kissing.
But the kids’ search for summer bliss leads them to danger. The final act of Jaws 2 places the teenagers out in the open water against the shark while Brody races to the rescue. Here, the shark circles them, pushing their boats around and snapping at any piece of flesh it can get. If a teen falls into the water, the camera cuts between their frantic crawls back onto the boat and the shark breaching to kill them. If it can’t snag a victim, it rips a bite out of the side of a boat or a sail. The moment’s hectic, filled with blood-curdling screams and flailing limbs.
The decision to anchor much of Jaws 2’s horrors around a group of sexually active teenagers makes the film feel more in line with its slasher contemporaries. Sure, its violence is often subdued, relying on terrified reactions from the teens instead of gory visuals. But it fully embraces its dynamic between young people in need of rescue from certain death and someone racing to save them.
And in that, we also see a sort of coming of age for these characters, namely the survivors of the shark’s attacks. In one scene, couple Eddie (Gary Dublin) and Tina (Ann Dusenberry) take a boat out for some alone time. Tina seems concerned that they’ve drifted so far from other boats, but Eddie reassures her. As she suggests Eddie grab a blanket for them to lie on, the shark’s fin appears in the distance, moving quickly to knock Eddie into the sea. Within seconds, it becomes a fever — Eddie attempts to swim back to safety, but the shark drags him around, eventually slamming him into the side of the boat before eating him.
It’s a horrifying death, one that leaves Tina petrified and catatonic long after she’s rescued. But like Brody in the original, being one of the final survivors means witnessing the horrors of dead allies and coming face-to-face with death yourself. It not only changes these characters’ relationships with each other, but also with themselves. While Jaws 2 approaches that “final girl” concept in a different way than its predecessor, it explores it with just as much intrigue and interest. And that keeps the film feeling fresh, too, giving it just enough distinction to exist as a sequel while still grounding it in the Spielbergian suspense of the original. By balancing what’s been done before with a few new ideas, Jaws 2 finds the sweet spot that makes it a worthy sequel — even to cinema’s biggest summer blockbuster.
