A simple, beautiful, 3-D fish. With a bunch of truly beautiful, real mammals courtesy of SeaWorld. Because the most logical place to set a Jaws sequel is to move from a New England tourist town to a Florida theme park. Obviously.
Yeah, this movie isn’t good. At all. It’s a disappointment. Obviously, Jaws is absolutely iconic and Jaws 2 is a worthy follow up. Jaws 3-D strips away everything recognizable and turns it into just another shark movie.
The plot is coherent enough, but poorly paced and does a poor job of establishing where people and creatures are in relation to each other. There’s a lot of set up for potentially cool kills and next to zero follow through. I wanted more kills. It would have livened things up.
We still technically have the Brody family. Mike and Sean are both grown up now. Mike is now an engineer and loves the water, while Sean is understandably traumatized after what happened in Amity and refuses to enter it.
I really don’t know why Sean is in this movie. He adds absolutely nothing of substance. Mike at least is our protagonist. He has skills and a reason to be actively involved in the plot. Sean spends 95% of his screentime whining at his girlfriend as she continuously tries to drag him into the water.
Mike is a decent protagonist, though. Dennis Quaid does a good, if unremarkable job. Really, no one stands out as a particularly good performance. Simon MacCorkindale at least had his strong English accent to distinguish his Phillip FitzRoyce from everyone, and Louis Gossett Jr. seemed like he was having fun as Calvin Bouchard. But that might be damning both of them with faint praise more than anything else.
I would probably care a lot more about who lived or died if I could actually see who it was when it happened. The photography throughout, but especially for any and all underwater scenes, was incredibly dim and muddy. It was very difficult to actually pick out any details. It didn’t help either that the scuba suits made it impossible to tell anyone apart too.
As the title implies, the movie was originally in 3-D, which means that there are a lot of things floating and flying out towards the audience. I watched it in 2-D, so I can’t comment on the effects themselves but they certainly were not subtle about them. At all. I found it distracting, but your mileage may vary when it comes to that.
The worst part about them, though, is that they made the shark look extra fake. I had to look up whether it was CGI or not. The shark was fully practical. It just looked bad. I know that I called out the previous sharks for not holding up all that well, but I would have loved to have something at the quality of the original Bruce.
The baby shark when it was in the viewing pool was probably the best any of them looked, and all it had to do was float.
It probably didn’t help that we had multiple real animals to compare the shark to. As befitting SeaWorld, there were real dolphins, orcas, and I think I saw a beluga all on screen. The dolphins in particular played very active roles.
I had trouble reconciling it with the knowledge that we now have about keeping those animals in captivity. I saw the collapsed dorsal fin on the orca and immediately winced. I wouldn’t have cared at all about this if I saw the movie when it first came out. I probably would have loved it and thought that the dolphins were the absolute best part. But now it’s just uncomfortable.
Apparently, the fourth movie is even worse, but we’ll have to save that for next year!
Random Thoughts
The movie was also released as Jaws 3 and Jaws III.
This is the only Jaws movie that does not have any cast members from the original.
Those underwater tunnels feel like a death trap. Anything that seals and traps people inside of small rooms with no way out is a lawsuit waiting to happen.
To this day, there still has not been a successful great white shark display at an aquarium. The longest a great white has been kept in captivity was 198 days.
Sharksploitation has a great section about the making of Jaws 3-D. (And is just an excellent documentary in general!)
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An Honest Fangirl loves video games, horror movies, and superheroes, and occasionally watches far too many shark movies.
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