Welcome to the Weekly Movie Thread! Today’s prompt: What is your favorite movie opening?
There are plenty of iconic ones. There’s the prologue from various James Bond movies, which stretch from the gunsight where you the viewer gets out-shot by 007 to the opening credits song… a short adventure to whet your appetite. The movies of the Star Wars saga gets out its nostalgia hooks with the iconic opening screen crawl. There are Saul Bass’ jazzy, minimalist sequences that he created for Alfred Hitchcock and others. A great recent example is the suspenseful opening of Drive, where Ryan Gosling successfully evades the police in a game of hide-and-seek.
Up in esteem for me is the beginning of Luc Besson’s 2017 movie, Valerian and The City of A Thousand Planets. (I’m thinking of reviewing the entire movie for my Made Overseas feature, since it is an English-language French movie.) It’s arguably the best part of the movie… a mini-movie in its own right. The decades-long progress of space exploration and creating a city filled with all sorts of alien communities are summed up in a montage of first contact encounters, all set to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”
It’s neat, it’s efficient, and it’s damn cool. It’s also one of the few sci-fi openings that’s devoted to peace. Boy, you’d think Star Trek would’ve done this but more often than not those movies open with conflict.
As always, we’re here to talk movies… so talk about movies you’ve seen recently! What movies do you recommend, Avocado?
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