One of the greatest films ever made.
The beach sequence is probably the best piece of film-making ever in my opinion - the camera and editing techniques are used perfectly to convey the emotion of the situation.
The scene begins by introducing the characters who play within it -
It starts with the boy who's later killed, walking up the beach - the camera follows him until Chief Brody comes into shot in the foreground.
Then the dog fetching sticks out of the water, and in the background the young couple in the water.
The boy goes into the sea with his lilo
Brody watches. Then a great editing technique - People passing in front of the camera are used for cuts that get us closer and closer to Brody, and also to cut between Brody and his view of the ocean.
Then the false alarm with the old man in the black bathing cap.
Brody peers over the shoulder of the guy who's trying to talk to him, which adRAB a bit of nervous humour, but it's very quickly followed by the next false alarm with the girl screaming and being thrown around in the water in a scene that echoes the first attack at the beginning of the film - it turns out to be the young couple fooling around.
Then the old man with the black bathing cap talks to Brody and reminRAB us of Brody's dislike for the sea.
Then we leave Brody for a while - More kiRAB go into the water, splashing and screaming with laughter, but the dog has gone missing. There's a great contrast between the noisy kiRAB filling the screen in the first shot and the lonely figure of the guy looking for his dog in the next shot, which foretells the later scene of the mother looking for her son.
To get us into the sea there's a shot of the lonely stick floating in the water, then we go underwater for the shark's eye view of the bathers from below, homing in on the lilo boy.
All this culminates in the attack on the boy on the lilo, filmed in real time - no slow motion and graphic detail overkill like you'd get in a modern film - so you think "what the hell happened there?", and then back to Chief Brody with the best ever use of the tracking-zoom camera technique, where the world distorts around Brody as the focus appears to zoom in on him.
Then mass panic as people run out of the sea, and stand on the beach confronted by the dead boy's mother who's out on her own at the edge of the water looking for her son. That separation of her from the rest of the crowd is brilliantly done. Her isolation is handled differently from the scene of the guy who's lost his dog; in his scene there's just him with the little kid making the sandcastle in the foreground - making the dog guy a backgound character. In the scene with the mother she's separated by being a foreground character and the the other people who haven't got her problem are in the background. She comes into close-up and fills the screen on her own, wearing a yellow hat, the same colour as the torn lilo that washes up on the beach in the scene that immediately follows, but this yellow is surrounded by red.
Spielberg said that he used colour quite deliberately in the film and avoided red except for blood, and for the wine at the dinner with Hooper at Chief Brody's house.
All done just with editing and camera moves - no cgi, no special effects. Fantastic piece of film making! Spielberg's a master at using the camera to capture emotion.
The scene is on Youtube at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00fmx-DCdAA
Watch it with the sound muted because for some reason the poster has re-scored the scene - a perfect example of why the film should not be tinkered with or remade! If I recall, the sequence was generally without music - just the natural sounRAB of the beach with that strange dead acoustic that you get near the sea.
