Jaws (Blu-ray + Digital Copy + UV Copy)

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If you've never seen Jaws, you're either 12 years old or you've been locked in a cupboard for far too long. The ocean scenes have had a rebalancing of the sky tone, lending it a more grey and flat colour as the director had originally intended. What’s especially nice, though, is that the sound quality between the many layers of the track sound to be the same in terms of quality. All other areas also come together exceptionally well, from Spielberg's directing, Butler's photography and Williams' iconic theme.

track while offering some clear if subtle emanations of mostly ambient environmental effects from the Atmos speakers. As an added bonus for Blu-ray fans, Universal also included the long-gestating documentary, The Shark is Still Working. Quite a lot of discussion on the use of non professional actors, and some interviews with Islanders from Martha's Vinyard that featured in the movie. I don’t think anybody will find any surprises in the supplements, but the old supplements still hold up and really get into great detail about the film’s production.You get to know Quint, Brody and Hooper; you get invested in the characters and their lives before the climax of the film, which makes it all the more effective. You can see in the extra features just how difficult making this movie was, and how the mechanical shark prop just didn’t work. This prejudicial attitude was brought about because I happened to watch Jaws 3D first (without the D) on television, and to top it off, I watched Jaws the Revenge, the movie that famously built Michael Caine’s house, without him ever having to watch it. It's lengthy, and not being a fan of trailers generally, it would almost certainly have spoiled the movie for me. Purists have lamented the absence of the original mono soundtrack though from previous UK DVD releases, and finally this Blu-ray disc remedies that, as it also has the original theatrical mono for English, French, Italian and Spanish in the DTS 2.

For those fearing a real botched job from Universal, who has a tendency to “over clean” their transfers for catalogue titles, they can put those fears mostly to rest. At startup, viewers go straight to the familiar main menu window with an edited cut of the film's opening nighttime swim scene, which then switches to a serene and calm view of the ocean with a buoy in the distance.Unruly edge enhancement and DNR are nowhere to be found which is comforting, as the risk of terrible shimmering effects with water when the footage is treated with any kind of enhancement is significant. There’s been some tweaking and a little bit of scrubbing, but nothing problematic comes up because of it.

When Matt Hooper enters that cage and confronts the terrifying beast face-to-face, I still wince and wiggle in my seat, just as I did when I was a little kid and my father showed me the film one summer night, over a tasty TV dinner of chicken nuggets and mashed potatoes. As a kid from a slum, when I first saw the Chief's car driving along the beach road at the beginning of the movie I turned to my friend watching with me and told him that one day I would get out of the ghetto and live in a place just like Amity Island and strangely enough, I happen to live now in the very place where the underwater shots of the real shark attacking the cage was shot - Port Lincoln South Australia - a place that looks quite a lot like ole Amity - Weird or what, right?In much the same way as Jaws kept millions of people out of the water, Blair Witch kept them out of the woods too. In comparison to the making-of it’s certainly not as good or as informative, and admittedly a lot of material in here (though not all) is covered in the other piece, but it’s still a lovingly put together program that’s also fairly entertaining itself. Knowing the history of Jaws is a rite of passage into the realm of Jaws fandom for any self-respecting lover of the film. Dialogue sticks mainly to the fronts with some stereo effects between the speakers while John Williams’ score fills in all of the speakers cleanly and naturally, almost like the orchestra is there with you, and the lower frequency delivers a strong amount of bass.