Cut to: Army helicopters swarming overhead as soldiers load semiautomatic weapons on the Marina Green in San Francisco and Chloe and Xander are briefed on what is happening across the country. A Navy admiral shows them footage of a shark jumping out of New York Harbor and biting the head off the Statue of Liberty. “At least they can’t invade dry land,” Chloe says.

“Think again,” the admiral says, then points to the video: the shark has legs.

“They’re mutating!” Xander gasps.

“Or evolving,” the admiral says.

Just then, the Golden Gate Bridge starts to sway behind them. “What is that?” a soldier screams. When Chloe turns to look, there are three monster sharks with enormous T. Rex legs, rising from the waves and marching across the bay. One is breathing fire. Another is shooting lasers from its eyes. Another is gulping down trolley cars like popcorn, and all three set about leveling San Francisco.

“You’re gonna need a bigger skyline,” Xander whispers. . . .

The original “Jaws,” released in 1975, was the first movie to make more than $100 million at the box office, and it has been blamed for every insipid summer blockbuster to hit the theaters ever since. For example: “ ‘Jaws’ whet corporate appetites for big profits quickly, which is to say studios wanted every film to be ‘Jaws,’ ” writes Peter Biskind in his 1998 book, “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.” The movie’s success “single-handedly [drove] serious movies off the summertime calendar,” Walter Shapiro wrote in Slate in 2002. “Hollywood had been happy to hit for average,” John Podhoretz wrote in 2010 in The Weekly Standard. “After ‘Jaws,’ it began swinging for grand slams.”

As a business model, “Jaws” may well have upended the movie industry. Creatively, though, it’s increasingly strange to blame “Jaws” for spawning the modern blockbuster, given how little Steven Spielberg’s esoteric, character-driven story has in common with today’s action extravaganzas. Compared with movies like “Pacific Rim,” “World War Z” and “White House Down,” “Jaws” is an art-house film. And a very good one: the film built suspense by focusing on what you couldn’t see more than on what you could. The young swimmer, up to her shoulders in murky water. A boy’s dangling legs, viewed from under the water. A swaying fishing boat, creaking eerily in the darkness.

Even when the shark is attacking, what we mostly see is splashing in the dark, a screaming woman just before being submerged. “It speaks well of this director’s gifts that some of the most frightening sequences in ‘Jaws’ are those where we don’t even see the shark,” Frank Rich wrote in New Times. (Indeed, the shark’s close-up toward the end may represent the least dramatic moment of the whole film.)

This approach was perfectly in keeping with Peter Benchley’s novel, which for long stretches reads like a John Cheever tale of small-town adultery featuring intermittent appearances by a shark. “Jaws,” the movie, focused on an obsessed patriarch and police chief named Brody. His home life — as would become a Spielberg signature in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T.” — was a disconcerting flurry of constant talk and movement, underscored by a buzzing thrum of domestic stress. The flocked wallpaper, the blaring telephone, a child’s bleeding hand: these details were designed to foreshadow the fact that the world is slipping out of our protagonist’s control. Throw in a manicured hand being eaten by crabs, a kid’s raft floating to shore with bite marks in it and a young son dragged from the water in shock as his mother yells, “He’s dead!” and you’ve got an unnerving tale of beach-town bliss gone horribly awry.