Homework Assignment

Assignment for the week of April 19th
Kevin Griffiths
English 12
Midlake Secondary School


1. Write a brief summary of the movie JAWS that we watched in class Monday.

Summary

The Chief of Police discovered that sharks kill. He attempted to advise the Mayor and Local Business Owners but they would have none of it. “What about Tourism,” they said?

A girl who was torn to bits while drinking at a beach party is said to have “died” in a “boating accident.” The Chief of Police was skeptical. Then a small boy was devoured in daylight at a public beach. His mother walked down the beach calling her son. She found the raft he was on shredded and bloody. That part was pretty sad, I guess.

There was a tonne of doubt shown by the Town Committee even though experts were brought in to prove that a killer shark was on the loose. Slowly, fear spread. There was a scene on a beach that showed families scattering in all directions at the site of a giant fin in the water. It turned out to be a hoax. I thought that was hilarious.

Several local fishermen arrived with hopes of being heroes. Their methods were generally unsound and unsafe. However, they did catch a shark. There was much rejoicing. People felt safe and the beaches were reopened. The Mayor and the Local Business Owners were satisfied that the threat was over.

This was decent writing on the part of the screenwriters because the “real” killer shark had not been caught and was still out there lurking. One can only assume a police inquiry would have ensued because an innocent shark had been slaughtered.

The Chief of Police eventually blows up the killer shark in a long-drawn out scene involving most of Act Three. I have to say, it was pretty cool when he stuffed that air-tank into the sharks mouth and then detonated it with a well-aimed rifle shot. Unfortunately, one of the supporting characters was lost in the battle, sliding into the killer sharks’ mouth like a sardine shortly before the climax.

The movie ends with the Chief of Police a hero, but for most people, summer was ruined.

2. Write an outline for a sequel to JAWS in five hundred words or less.

Sequel

In JAWS 12: Nature Controlled, the Chief of Police has formed a Shark Rehabilitation Task Force. His new title is Director of Correctional Services. He tracks sharks with sonar devices and arrests them. He has a horde of Lieutenants and Generals that speed out from the mother boat, which is called Shark and Destroy and registered to Panama. The sharks are subdued by taser.

The character of the Director is modeled after Dog the Bounty Hunter and is played by Sylvester Stallone. The Director has a love interest, Maria, which is performed amazingly by historical footage of Julie Andrews from the Sound of Music.

The Director takes the sharks back to an Ocean Based Pen where he counsels them on their deviant ways and subjects them to monotonous routines of swimming in straight lines. The Director sees himself as a Shark Whisperer.

Small groups of protesters picket the Ocean Based Pen in zodiacs. They question the ethics of having an Ocean Based Pen without Tom Costner present. This subplot is dealt with when the Task Force comes to the rescue of a capsized zodiac, proving once and for all that hippies in small boats are inferior to men with enormous machines.

After many months of successful treatments, the sharks are released into the wild, in particular, the waters nearing third world countries. Little is mentioned whether the rehabilitation program is successful, and it is just assumed, from the lack of reporting or post-care follow-up, that everything is fine.

One day Rex Murphy and a television camera crew arrive at the Ocean Based Pen to do a special on shark rehabilitation.

The Director had planned to use this opportunity as a press conference. He was to announce that a treaty had been signed between sharks and humans.

News of the press conference was leaked. The BBC showed up. So did CNN and Al Jazeera. Anderson Cooper was wearing a cardigan. The Al Jazeera correspondent, Avi Lewis, could be seen talking furiously on a satellite phone in English. Nigel Wrench, of the BBC, was nowhere to be found; instead, they sent a football pundit, Paul Gascoigne.

The Director read the details of the treaty from a prepared statement. He stood before a backdrop draped in the soft tones of sandalwood and forest berry. Then, suddenly, a rogue shark, one supposedly in the process of rehabilitation, but clearly not, an imposter with an agenda, hurled himself out of the Ocean Based Pen in what can only be described as a suicide attack. The shark annihilated the Director in one crisp bite and subsequently destroyed himself when he detonated an air-tank in his stomach, an act surely seen as tragically ironic. The blast killed several Shark Rehabilitation Task Force employees and Rex Murphy. Obviously, the treaty was rejected.

This sets the stage for JAWS 13: All Bets are Off, staring Nicholas Cage as the new Director and Ben Stiller as “Patchy,” the half-human-half-shark leader of the Carcharhiniformes Resistance.