Film Review: Jaws still has its teeth, nearly 50 years on, in a 3D edition

(From left) Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider, and Richard Dreyfuss in Steve Spielberg’s Jaws. Photo: Universal Pictures

• Jaws (RealD 3D) 
• ★★★★☆

“You open the beaches on the 4th of July, it’s like ringing the dinner-bell.”

It’s nearly 50 years since Steven Spielberg struck box office gold with Jaws (12A), and it’s still as primally terrifying today. That’s because the territorial shark is implacable Nature writ large, a threat that can neither be reasoned with nor mollified and especially when we venture out into the dark depths.

Brody (Roy Scheider), the cop charged with protecting the people of Amity from a man-eating killer, knows this by instinct, although the movie’s best scene remains the Indianapolis monologue delivered by the grizzled seaman Quint (Robert Shaw), who knows all about how unforgivably brutal Nature can be when it reveals itself red in tooth and claw.

This version of Jaws is delivered in RealD 3D, which — apart from an occasional expansion of depth perception in the underwater scenes — doesn’t really lend an awful lot to the film’s appeal.

Mind you, if you’ve never seen it on the big screen, this one-week only offering is unmissable.

(IMAX cinema release)