Flawless victory.
That’s a pretty good reason as well. He is almost the prefect reverse barometer.
Jaws for me. I saw it as a kid (I’m only in my twenties now) and when I first saw it I watched it in german (I have never spoken German.) And I knew as a 10 year old how good Jaws was even with out the dialogue. It’s a total film, everything adds up to a great experience, visuals, score, audio and acting. I still love it now.
Now I’m about to have my nerd card cut up. I don’t like Star Wars. The characters all seemed annoying. As a child I could never sit through it because it bored me, and I just wanted to go out and play with my spaceships. I did much prefer Ewoks: Battle for Endor. Which along with my siblings we wore out the tape of.
My sister is now a closet Star Wars nerd. She wore her lucky Star Wars t-shirt to her toughest exam the other day. Her friends think it’s an ironic t-shirt, little do they know. So this shows its not my nerd genes being wrong.
Star Wars had the much greater impact on my childhood, and I hadn’t seen Jaws the way it was meant to be (non-TV version etc) till I was into my teens. But these days, I could happily never see Star Wars ever again, and in contrast, I’d be happy to watch Jaws again any time. So Jaws it is.
Star Wars, easily.
When I was small I thought princess Leia was awesome, simply because she had guts compared to the simpering princesses other media at the time offered, and I dreamt of being an X-wing pilot for most of my childhood.
As a teenager I had a huge crush on Luke Skywalker.
I made my best friend go to the cinema with me when the remastered versions were shown, it was a dream come true seeing the movies on the big screen at that time since I’d only ever watched them on tv.
Like Robert Sharp said, Star Wars moved me, it was a world I wanted to live in.
I never watched Jaws to be honest, I’m very squeemish and the few horror movies I did watch and like are the suspenceful ones, not the gorefests. Jaws has been spoofed and spoilered so often by now that even if I had some vague interest in it, it probably wouldn’t have as much impact as it would have had watching it years ago.
Neither was particularly formative for me, but it’s easy to choose Star Wars over Jaws. The latter is a competent monster movie, but no amount of cinematography or pacing can change the fact that it’s fundamentally interchangeable with later efforts like Lake Placid or Deep Blue Sea. As a Spielberg film, I like most of his other movies better in terms of how they hold up to repeat viewings (if we can isolate his “historical” films into their own sub-group), and as an early Spielberg film, I find much more to admire in The Duel (which I think does a lot more interesting things with fear and the mundane, while we’re at it).
In contrast, Star Wars as a single film or as a start to a trilogy offers something that has not been matched in any science fiction film since, which is based in its multigenre appeal to a mass audience while still including so much for detail-oriented people to enjoy.
But then, I was in the theater in the first couple of weeks it opened, in complete awe of the opening scene. I still remember the visceral impact. Nothing like that had ever been shown in theaters before.
As an aside, I’ve been rewatching the original trilogy with my 17-year old daughter. At the end of Empire Strikes Back, she turns to me and asks: “So next episode, they’re going go find the douchebag sealed in carbonite?” :-D
Star Wars. Watching it recently with the kids it struck me what an odd movie it is. Every popcorn movie mimics it now, so it’s hard to remember how strange it was at the time. Fast cutting that just speeds up until scenes go by at a subliminal rate, Ben Burtt’s soundscape, the big John Williams score, spaceships from the used car lot, colorful characters filmed on black-white-gray sets etc. It’s full of stuff that hadn’t been seen before. It’s kind of avant garde.
It’s definitely Star Wars for me by a landslide. My mother took me to see it opening night – I was five years old, and my mother tells me it’s the first time I ever sat still, eyes wide open and slack jawed as the Star Destroyer rumbled by overhead. It definitely shaped my childhood and is no doubt responsible for making me the sci-fi fanatic that I am today. Even the prequels and all the crap novels can’t take away the joy that my much younger self got from the movies (and toys, let’s be honest).
But I can’t say Jaws had no influence. I was too young for the first one, but I do remember my mom taking me to see Jaws 2 a few years later. It wigged me out something fierce. It also ingrained a fascination with sharks specifically and marine biology generally that also lasts to this day. I spent a few years volunteering at the Seattle Aquarium and have considered chucking everything and going back to school to study oceanography. Somewhat seriously.
Hugin raises a valid point, though. In my studies about sharks it’s plainly clear that whatever the hell Jaws is about, it ain’t any kind of shark we see on this planet. Biologists have shot down the ‘rogue shark’ theory, and there just aren’t any animals that pursue people with a single-minded serial killer grudge like Bruce does. So, I just pretend it’s some kind of vicious monster that happens to look like a shark, enough to fool Brody and Hooper and Quint into thinking it actually is one, and I can still enjoy the movie for what it is. Everybody wins!
That kid ain’t right, Loyd.
Jaws for me. I saw both at the theater on release - I was in early-mid high school at the time. Jaws floored me. Star Wars disappointed me.
I’ve said elsewhere on this forum in the past that I felt that Star Wars was good, but seemed to be cluttered with too much campy cartoony stuff to me. I was turned off by the cutesy robots and black cape. Jaws was real life, Star Wars was a neat cartoon with great special effects for the time.
Of course, I still went to see Star Wars 10 times, all for the space battle scenes. I only went to see Jaws 3 times. Once you see Jaws for the first time, the tension isn’t the same.
Star Wars came out when I was 11 & I had been a huge science fiction fan since I was about six. It’s the cultural framework of my youth.
I don’t think Jaws had any personal influence on me. I didn’t see it until I was much older, and sharks never have been a source of fear to me. That’s likely a side effect of growing up around San Francisco & getting carted off to an aquarium for every other field trip. Being insufferable in movies is another side effect of being a nerd, so I didn’t buy the ridiculous shark behavior either.
I think Jaws paved the way for Star Wars. It brought the blockbuster movie into existence. I guarantee anyone who saw Jaws had second thoughts before getting in the water. There’s a definite primal fear that is awakened when you watch that film.
Star Wars (the original version) wins though because it is the mythos story that has been told around the campfire since the dawn of time.
It’s interesting to see most people voting according too their generation. As an older person I’ll go with Tom’s assessment. Jaws was a much better formative movie. I was 12 when I saw the movie and it stayed in my head whenever I went to the beach for at least the next 10 years.
I was 13 when I saw Star Wars and whilst I thought it was awesome, it didn’t manipulate me as much as Jaws.
So you’re saying it wins because it’s the most derivative of the two?
(Don’t kill me, Star Wars fans! I’m one of you, to a certain extent!)
Jaws changed my life. I would not go in the ocean after that. Also, I saw stuff in that movie(saw it as a kid in the theater when it first came out) that I had never seen before. A guy getting bitten in half, the leg, the mangled corpse popping out, the GIRL GETTING NAKED!
Star Wars, by the time it came out, had Darth Vader vs Obi-wan with lightsabers. Two guys rubbing symbolic weenies.
I vote for the naked girl.
Jaws. I was pretty young when I saw both of these movies, but even as a kid, I was always more into horror than sci-fi. I have fond memories of being terrified of movies like Jaws, Nightmare on Elm St., Halloween, and Friday the 13th. Those memories outweigh anything I felt for Star Wars as a youngin.
Most of my friends would disagree with me and call me a bad nerd, though.
I picked Star Wars, but I think Jaws is the better movie. However, I didn’t see Jaws until much later in life, so I can’t really say it had the same influence on me as Star Wars did.
I do think Star Wars is probably more influential than Jaws, though. Look at all the big blockbusters today, almost all of them are Sci-Fi / Comic book stuff. Whereas I would put Jaws down more as a horror / disaster movie. Which of course, you still see … just not as much. And big tentpole disaster movies existed before Jaws (without the horror angle). Here I’m thinking The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno (which was nominated for Best Picture!).
Some really interesting comments all around. I’m not surprised to see Star Wars so far ahead. But I am surprised at anyone who can’t express a personal preference for one or the other. Because if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. I think that line is from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
-TomI will happily concede that Jaws is better written, directed, and acted than Star Wars. And I’ve never been that a big of a Star Wars fan – I was past the perfect age for it (i.e. over 12) when it came out. I was already a jaded science fiction fan who knew exactly where Lucas pulled his inspirations from, so Star Wars was not quite the revelation for me that it was for some people.
Still, I voted for Star Wars. That’s because both movies are pure popcorn entertainments, and Star Wars is flat-out more entertaining. Yes, it has some lines that make you roll your eyes and yes, some of its actors seem to be carved out of wood. Yet it’s a nonstop parade of Western vistas, science fiction samurai, subtitled gangster aliens, Wizard of Oz in-jokes, and World War Two spaceship fights. It’s hard to remember how dense, rapidfire, and exhilarating it was today, because every single frame has been has been turned into a toy line, a series of novels, and a Web site.
Jaws does one thing, and does it very well, but Star Wars condensed the entire history of pulp adventure into a single experience.