Plot
A girl named Chrissie Watkins leaves an evening beach party on New England's Amity Island to go skinny dipping in the Atlantic Ocean. After swimming out near a buoy, she is seized by an unseen force from below that thrashes her around before dragging her below the surface.
Chrissie is reported missing and her remains are found on the beach by police chief Martin Brody. The medical examiner informs Brody that she was killed by a shark. Brody plans to close the beaches but is overruled by Mayor Larry Vaughan, who fears that reports of a shark attack will ruin the summer tourist season, the town's primary source of income. The medical examiner consequently attributes the death to a boating accident. Brody reluctantly goes along with the explanation. The shark then kills a young boy swimming at the beach. His mother places a bounty on the shark, sparking an amateur shark-hunting frenzy and attracting the attention of local professional shark hunter Quint, who offers to kill the shark for $10,000, valuing his own life at no less. Marine biologist Matt Hooper examines Chrissie's remains and determines that she was killed by a shark, not a boat.
A large tiger shark is caught by fishermen, leading the townspeople to believe the problem is solved, but Hooper asks to examine its stomach contents. Vaughan refuses to allow the necropsy. That evening, Brody and Hooper discover the dead shark does not contain human remains. They head out to sea in an attempt to find the shark. Instead, they discover the half-sunken wreckage of a boat belonging to local fisherman Ben Gardner. Hooper explores the vessel underwater and discovers a sizable shark's tooth protruding from the damaged hull before he is startled by Gardner's remains and drops the tooth. Without evidence, Vaughan refuses to close the beaches, and on the Fourth of July many tourists arrive. A children's prank causes panic at the main beach while the shark enters a nearby estuary, killing a man; Brody's son, who witnesses the attack, goes into shock. Brody persuades Vaughan to hire Quint. Quint reluctantly allows Hooper and Brody to join the hunt, but forces them to accept crew mate positions under him as a captain. The three set out to kill the shark aboard Quint's vessel, the Orca.
Brody is given the task of laying a chum line while Quint uses piano wire to try to hook the shark. Later, an enormous great white shark looms up behind the boat, and the trio watch it circle the Orca while Hooper takes pictures for research and Quint estimates its size as twenty-five feet in length, with a weight of 6,000 pounds. Quint harpoons it with a line attached to a flotation barrel, but the shark pulls the barrel under and disappears.
The men retire to the boat's cabin, where Quint relates his experience with sharks as a survivor of the sinking of the warship USS Indianapolis in 1945 during World War II . The shark reappears, damaging the boat's hull before slipping away. In the morning, the shark appears again and Brody attempts to call the U.S. Coast Guard, but Quint destroys the radio and harpoons the shark with another barrel. After a long chase, Quint harpoons another barrel to the shark. The men tie them both to the stern, but the shark drags the boat backwards, forcing water onto the deck and flooding the engine. Quint heads toward shore, hoping to draw it into shallow waters and suffocate it. In his obsession to kill the shark, Quint burns out the bearings in the Orca's engine.
With the boat immobilized, the trio attempt a desperate approach: Hooper dons scuba gear and enters the ocean inside a shark proof cage, aiming to stab the shark with a hypodermic spear filled with strychnine. The shark attacks the cage from behind, causing Hooper to drop the spear. When the shark gets tangled in the wrecked cage, Hooper escapes and hides in the seabed. As Quint and Brody raise the mangled cage, the shark leaps onto the boat, crushing the transom and causing the Orca to raise up. Quint slides down the watery deck to the shark and is killed after a bloody tussle, stabbing the shark in the head with a machete. When the shark attacks again, Brody shoves a pressurized scuba tank into its mouth, then takes Quint's rifle and climbs the sinking Orca's mast. The shark, with the tank still in its mouth, begins charging Brody. Brody shoots the scuba tank, causing it to explode and blow the shark to pieces. Hooper swims to the surface and they use the barrels to swim to shore.
Read more about this topic: Jaws (film)
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