Opening Montages

[Argent]

So a good opening Montage can set the entire movie up for success. It can set the mood with music, show backstory to introducing charaters.

Take the montage from Watchmen. It manages to show the past changes to history from Kennedy to the Vietnam War. It allows the movie to give a lot of information to the user so they understand the world of Watchmen without spending a lot of screen time. It also sets up the movie to show the general breakdown of order and lack of hopefulness that is throughout the movie.




Even a movie that is not great can still have a good good opening montage. The Justice League movie does a good job. While a below average movie the opening montage does a decent job of showing the general disappear that world feels after Superman death.


So with the rooftop fight scene Justice League mangned to set the entire plot and give enough background for everyone who did not see Batman V Superman in around 6 mintues.

Overall when a movie need to have a lot to successful but a feel a good beginning can help a lot. So what opening montage do like and think set the movie up for success?

 

[prinCZess]

I think the opening for Lord of War very perfectly set-up the movie. The main character is introduced (and summarized) very briefly with one sentence of dialogue, and it follows by tracking a single bullet through production to shipment to eventual use and combined with the protest-song chosen, goes a long way to putting up the kind of dark-comedy and depressing-theme tone that gets riffed on through the rest of the movie.


It might be a bit of a stretch to call the opening 'slow-pan across space and then through a spaceship set to unsettling music/tone-and-bumping' a 'montage', but it does a good job of establishing the setting and putting up the tone.



Bullit gives a very time-exemplifying opening sequence? It (and its style) and the old James Bond intros (and their style) have basically become the background examples everyone thinks of whenever the openings to 60s crime/spy movies come up. The saxophone that comes in midway through especially says a lot without saying anything.


Maybe it's just appreciation for Jerry Reed, and maybe it's cheating because it's a ballad-song written for the film, but Smokey and the Bandit has a fun opening that summarizes a good bit of the plot, one of the title characters, and introduces the 'character' of the semi-truck

 

[Argent]

@prinCZess while I have not seen your last two movies in whole but I do agree about Lord of War. Not only is it different from most openings it tells a tale that is important to the plot. Lord of War is what War Dogs wanted to be but failed at. This is one of Cages best movies and shows why he is so popular despite have a mixed record in flim choices.

I personally would count Alien as an opening montage. It has music, shows a big theme thoughout Alien and it's squeals. The opening really drives in the fact that in Space you are all alone. Showing the emptiness does set the scene for the movie and the music adds to the suspense. It let's the audience see how alone the crew is when the Aliens attack and how hopeless waiting for help is instead of just saying that help is far away. It very tell that movies like Prometheus forgets this fact are inferior to the frist ones.

To many horror movies fail to show the isolation that makes them possible. Alien does a good job of this right off the bat. So while not the best opening montage I have seen it is good and serves a very important point for the future plotlines in the movie.



Probably one of the best opening montages I have seen would be Up. I saw it in theaters and it managed to keep the attention of a bunch of ten year olds. That is hard go do with a long sequence with out words or really physical humor.



The whole thing is basically a mini prequel to the movie and could stand by its self. The entire montage while setting up the Ed is a complete story with a beginning, middle and end. I am sure that the frist ten minutes of Up could have won awards for short films by itself. Overall while most of the time critics are useless here I agree that the beginning of Up is what other opening sequences strive to be.

 

[Argent]

So I was introducing someone to the classic D.C. universe cartoons. Started with Batman since a lot of current characters interpretations come from this show. Just look at how Doctor Freeze is handled now from his earlier comic appearances. Not to mention making Harley Quinn into a Batman mainstay.

But the opening montage has to be one of the better ones I have seen. It sets the tone with darker tones while doing a decent job of show Batman in his role as a hero.