Five great movies that recovered from an awful opening scene
As the old saying goes, you only get one chance to make a good first impression. In movies, the opening scene is crucial—it sets the tone, introduces key characters and plot points, and gets audiences excited to spend the next two to three hours immersed in the story. A weak opening can set a film back significantly, but occasionally, movies manage to recover from a shaky start and still leave a lasting impact.
These pictures have opening scenes that are worse than the rest of the film and objectively bad. Slow, overly dense, and boring, they should have killed any chance of them succeeding. It’s a credit to the rest of the runtime that they are held in any sort of regard.
It’s easier to sit through these lacklustre openings knowing the payoff is worth it, but at the time, audiences had no way of knowing their patience would be rewarded. Who knows how many paying customers walked out of theatres after enduring these dull beginnings, only to regret it later when glowing reviews revealed what they had missed?
All of this goes to show that you should always give a movie the benefit of the doubt, even if it does start under less-than-ideal circumstances.
Great movies that recovered from an awful opening scene:
5. Kicking and Screaming (Noah Baumbach, 1995)
Better known today for being the director of Marriage Story and the husband of Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach got his start making low-budget indie affairs in the 1990s. His first directorial effort was Kicking and Screaming, a comedy-drama about a group of high school graduates grappling with the next stages in their lives. It stars the likes of Josh Hamilton, Olivia D’Abo, Elliott Gould, and Parker Posey and is a fantastic watch if you can get past the first scene.
The action begins with Jane (D’Abo) telling her boyfriend Grover (Hamilton) that she’s off to continue her studies in Prague. Cue a very tedious back and forth where the two teens attempt to reconcile their differences – Jane asks Grover to come with him, and he says no – before they go their separate ways. Grover comes across as extremely unlikeable, refusing to accept Jane’s decision because it interferes with his own plans. We come to like his character over the course of the movie, which is equal parts funny and eye-opening, but none of that context is present in this drab opening salvo. An inauspicious start from a future great.
4. A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, 2006)
Richard Linklater’s ode to the uncanny valley, A Scanner Darkly, is an adaptation of a novel by sci-fi master Philip K Dick. Set in the not-too-distant future, the world has been ravaged by mass drug addiction, police surveillance, and general paranoia. Keanu Reeves plays Bob Arctor, a law enforcement agent who goes undercover to find the source of the substance problems and root them out. Not only is the film technically impressive with its real-time animation techniques, but the story is intriguing, and performances from Reeves, Robert Downey Jr, Winona Ryder, and more will keep you hooked.
Unfortunately, due to the unconventional nature of the film’s presentation, A Scanner Darkly did lose people during its opening. The mixture of live-action and rotoscoped images can be extremely off-putting, and it doesn’t help that the content of the introduction is heavy world-building and dense character introduction. All of this can combine to produce a headache-inducing scenario, one that some people simply couldn’t get over when reviewing the film. Still, if you persevere and allow Linklater to guide you through his odd-looking landscape, you’ll be in for a gripping adventure.
3. Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998)
Famed for being a box office bomb and influencing the Wachowskis when they made The Matrix, Alex Proyas’ Dark City is a sci-fi thriller with more than a whiff of noir about it. Rufus Sewell plays John Murdoch, a man accused of committing a murder he can’t remember. He goes on the run in an attempt to clear his name, encountering a group of strange individuals who can manipulate reality.
Distributor New Line Cinema worried that audiences wouldn’t be able to keep up with the complex lore of Dark City, so they forced Proyas to include a pandering voiceover at the start of the film to spell out what was going on. This totally kills the vibe of the murky, mysterious world created by the rest of the project and feels totally infantilising because, well, that’s exactly what it is. This element was one of many things changed by a director’s cut of Dark City, which was released in 2008, and it is much better for it. New Line clearly had no faith in the intelligence of their viewers, and it ended up costing them dearly.
2. Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Rian Johnson, 2017)
Some people will turn their noses up at this movie being called ‘great’, as Star Wars: The Last Jedi is one of the most divisive instalments in a franchise known for its fickle fans. The second part of the sequel trilogy (and eighth movie in the overall ‘Skywalker Saga’), The Last Jedi is full of fun and interesting ideas that, sadly, were mostly abandoned or retconned in the next film. Even fans of Rian Johnson’s work don’t love everything about it, though, as its opening scene is a lot of hard work to get through.
The movie begins with a First Order assault on the Resistance. Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) ignores orders from General Leia (Carrie Fisher) and launches a counterattack, killing pretty much all of his troops and looking like a total idiot in the process. This sequence isn’t helped by the unceremonious death of Admiral Ackbar and the utter nonsense of Leia flying through space using the Force, but things do improve eventually. Well, for a little while, anyway. Then The Rise of Skywalker happens, and Palpatine returns, and… OK, that’s a rant for another time.
1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (David Yates, 2011)
The thrilling conclusion to the Wizarding World’s main story, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 is miles better than Part 1, AKA ‘Harry and his friends go camping for two hours’. There’s action, there’s drama, there’s the all-time great Snape reveal, all to send the beloved series off into the distance with the bang it deserved. Alas, it isn’t perfect, especially because it makes the baffling decision to focus its opening few minutes on recapping the previous film.
Part 1 had only come out one year earlier, so it was still fresh in fans’ minds. There was absolutely zero need to waste time going over the key plot points of the last movie, especially as viewers were already annoyed that the final book had been split into two films. The ‘real’ opening of Part 2 – Harry crying by Dobby’s graveside – would have been a much more effective cold open than what we got, not least because it wouldn’t have reminded audiences of how they’d been fleeced for two separate cinema tickets by greedy studio heads. To paraphrase the great Ron Weasley, ‘Bloody hell, Warner Bros’.
