Fifty years after “Jaws” sunk its teeth into us, we’re still admiring the bite mark.

Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film, his second feature, left such a imprint on culture and Hollywood that barely any trip to the movies, let alone to the beach, has been the same since.

Few films have been more perfectly suited to their time and place than “Jaws,” which unspooled across the country in a then-novel wide release accompanied by Universal Pictures’ opening-weekend publicity blitz.

“Jaws” wasn’t quite the first movie to try to gobble up moviegoers whole, in one mouthful, but “Jaws” established — and in many ways still defines — the summer movie.

That puts “Jaws” at the birth of a trend that has since consumed Hollywood: the blockbuster era. When it launched in 409 theaters on June 20, 1975, and grossed a then-record $7.9 million in its first days, “Jaws” set the template that has been followed ever- after by every action movie, superhero flick or dinosaur film that’s tried to go big in the summer — a sleepy time in theaters before “Jaws” came around.

And yet the “Jaws” legacy is so much more. It’s just too good a movie — and too much unlike so many wannabes since — to be merely groundbreaking. It’s a masterpiece in its own right.

“It supercharged the language of cinema,” filmmaker Robert Zemeckis says in the documentary “Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story,” premiering in July on National Geographic.

That documentary, with Spielberg’s participation, is just a small part of the festivities that have accompanied the movie’s anniversary. Martha’s Vineyard, where “Jaws” was shot, hosted everything from concerts to “Jaws”-themed dog dress-ups. “Jaws” is streaming on Peacock through July 14, with an introduction from Spielberg.

The “Jaws” anniversary feels almost more like a national holiday.

But if “Jaws” is one of the most influential movies ever made, Hollywood hasn’t always drawn the right lessons from it. “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” has perhaps been taken too literally in movies that have leaned too much on scale and spectacle, when neither of those things really had much to do with the brilliance of Spielberg’s classic.

Here are some of the things Hollywood could learn from “Jaws” 50 years later.

Local color

Every time I rewatch “Jaws,” I marvel at how much it gets from its Martha’s Vineyard setting.

Various incentives often determine movie shooting locations, with set dressings or CGI filling in the rest. But “Jaws” shows you just how much more than tax credits you can get from a locale. Spielberg was convinced the adaptation of Peter Benchley’s novel shouldn’t be done in soundstages. After looking up and down the Atlantic coast, he settled on Nantucket’s neighboring island. Like his first film, the Mojave Desert-set “Duel,” Spielberg wanted his mechanized shark to swim in a real, definable place.

“I felt the same way about ‘Jaws,’ ” Spielberg says in the documentary. “I wanted to go to the natural environment so there was some kind of verisimilitude. So it needed to be in the ocean, out to sea.”

It wasn’t easy. The budget for “Jaws” nearly tripled to $9 million and the shoot extended from 55 days to 159. Spielberg would never again be under financial pressure on a picture, but the tortured “Jaws” production put him under a microscope.

“ ‘Jaws’ was my Vietnam,” he told journalist Richard Schickel. “It was basically naive people against nature, and nature beat us every day.”

It also infused every inch of the frame with small-town New England flavor in the way that no soundstage or CGI ever could.

Less is more

When Spielberg was ready to start filming, his star attraction wasn’t. The mechanized shark suffered frequent failures that forced Spielberg to find different approaches to shooting his shark scenes early in the film.

“Jaws” instead became, to Spielberg, a kind of homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” The suspense came less from the shark than the fear of the unknown and that spine- tingling question: What’s in the water? Spielberg, with the aid of John Williams’ instantly iconic score, delayed the appearance of his Great White until well into the film.

“The visual ellipsis,” critic Molly Haskell wrote, “created far greater menace and terror, as the shark is nowhere and everywhere.”

Nowadays, the shark would almost certainly be done with computer animation. But “Jaws” showed that often the most powerful source of dread is our imagination.

Human-scale

All manner of summer movies have had no bones about destroying cities for a mere plot point. Yet for all its terror, “Jaws” features a handful of deaths. All of its drama is human-scaled. Compared to more swaggering blockbusters today, “Jaws” would be considered a modest, midbudget movie.

The movie has only three main characters: Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and Quint (Robert Shaw). Casting director Sherry Rhodes filled the cast with locals from the island, many of whom inject the film with little moments of day- to-day humanity. “Jaws,” in that way, feels more like a community than a cast.

Escapism with something to say

On the one hand, “Jaws” had little to do directly with its times. The Vietnam War had just ended. Watergate had just led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. The heart- stopping story of a shark off the Massachusetts shoreline promised escapism.

Yet “Jaws” has endured as a parable of capitalism, pulled out time and time again to illustrate those endlessly repeating clashes of cash versus social safety.

“Amity is a summer town,” Amity’s mayor, Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) says in the film. “We need summer dollars.”

The shark gets the theme song and the movie poster, but the real villain of “Jaws” wears a pinstripe suit and smiles for the cameras. “As you can see, it’s a beautiful day, and the beaches are open,” he says. More than the predator in the ocean, he, and the town, feast on human flesh.

‘Jaws’ is untouchable

There are boatloads of movies — including the three sequels that followed — that have tried in vain to capture some of the magic of “Jaws.” But what happened in June 1975, let alone on Martha’s Vineyard the year before, isn’t repeatable. Even the greatest movies are products of a thousand small miracles. That title? Benchley came up with it minutes before going to print. The iconic poster came from Roger Kastel’s painting for the book. Scheider learned about the movie by overhearing Spielberg at a party. Williams relied on just two notes for one of the most widely known film scores in movie history. But no ingredient mattered more on “Jaws” than the man behind the camera. Filmmaking talents like Spielberg come around maybe a couple times a century, and in “Jaws,” he emerged, spectacularly.

What’s maybe most striking about “Jaws” 50 years later is how much it still doesn’t look like anything else.