The Best Opening Scenes In '90s Movies

It's a bopping 1977 evening in the San Fernando Valley, as a group of moviegoers leave a theater with "Boogie Nights" in Candice font lit up on its marquee. The smooth sounds of The Emotions' "Best of My Love" swells (director Paul Thomas Anderson told NPR it was the only choice after "Carlito's Way" used "Got To Be Real") as the action, in one long and luscious continuous take, is shifted to a nearby discotheque called Hot Traxx. In a whirlwind spin around the club, a majority of the film's characters, who are involved in the porn industry, are introduced (and in some cases, the actor is making their first introduction to an audience in a breakout role), enjoying the groovy good life. Famed smut director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) is holding court, but his attention is stolen by a young busboy (Mark Wahlberg); he sees something in him — "I got a feeling, behind those jeans, there's something wonderful just waiting to get out."

The scene, which reviewer Joe Baltake called an "electrifying burst of neon-tinted energy," breaks out the funk, before things in the picture eventually become a little too funky (and awfully depressing). Anderson, who creatively borrowed from Scorsese's "Goodfellas," would later say in a 2003 interview at Croatia's Motovun Film Festival that "you don't want to do something just to show off ... but if you can show off and this also kind of helps progress the story ... in a really interesting way you can introduce the characters. Then that's good ... just don't get caught."

Hovering above Earth, a cacophony of audio transmissions are playing over one another in the opening of "Contact," as the camera pulls away in a backward zoom from the blue planet, then deeper and deeper into the far reaches of space. The Academy Award nominated soundscape starts from the 1997 present (Spice Girls' "Wannabe") and ripples through the past (from Neil Armstrong's "one small step" speech to even Morse code), until silence sets in at the furthest point the planet's audio has traveled. Swirls of beautiful colors and starry shapes rapidly fly by (take that, Stanley Kubrick and your "Space Odyssey"), dazzling the eye as it exits the solar system and onto the endless reaches of the universe, before hyper-speedily clustering together in a white starry mash and then fading away into the eye of the film's protagonist, young Ellie Arroway.

The adult Ellie, who believed that a further truth existed beyond the stars, was played by Jodie Foster, who said on the DVD commentary (via Art of the Title) that this "spectacular" opening sequence "is a view of the universe that no one has ever had and it really comes out of Carl Sagan's life's work." 

In their own commentary, director Robert Zemeckis said showing this "universe in the blink of an eye" became a running theme for all that followed in the movie, to which producer Steven Starkey spoke for all the starstrucked viewers when saying with this new distant view, "you render yourself rather insignificant in relation to the whole."

The "Contact" opening scene is still doing as such, inspiring the opening sequence of the "Loki" Season One finale.

Oliver Stone "hit the central nerve core of the establishment" (via Variety) with critics and historians in 1991's "JFK," a muckraking screen attempt to bring to light the secret, unknown darkness that may (or may not) have orchestrated the assassination of the 35th US president. 

After more than 3 hours of presenting "evidence," the Shakespearean phrase "what's past is prologue" appears as the penultimate line of text before the end credits scroll. Fitting, as the prologue at the head of the film gives viewers a well needed overview of the past that leads up to that fateful November day in 1963, the hunt for the truth that followed, and the ripple effect it had on America.

Academy Award winning cinematographer Robert Richardson said that with "JFK," he and Stone "created a strong documentary feel for the first two sections of the film" (via "Virgin Film: Oliver Stone") and nowhere is that better put into play than in that "daringly and dazzlingly" opening montage which combines newsreel footage and new footage stylized to match. 

Starting with exiting President Eisenhower's words of warning about the power that revolves around the military industrial complex, followed by the rise of his successor, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and both the hope and danger he brought to the office, John Williams' noble score is perfectly matched with crisp narration from Martin Sheen (no stranger to Kennedy or presidential screen work) in this summarization of historical events. Stone also takes great care to humanize Kennedy in the montage, showing his glossy-smiling family life, and ending with a quote of his saying "we are all mortal," before he delves into unraveling all the theories behind the conspiracies.

After terrorizing Queen Elizabeth the II (but also saving her life) in the conclusion of 1988's utterly punny "Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!," Detective Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) brought his world of slapstick trouble to the White House in the riotous opening of its 1991 sequel – "The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear." 

Celebrating his 1,000th drug dealer killed, Drebin is a guest of President George HW Bush, and the thanks he gives in return is obliviously battering around his wife, First Lady Barbara Bush (lookalikes Ron Long and Margery Rose). Drebin walks around with wide eyes and a big smile, and without the knowledge that he's smacking her nose with a door, banging her head under a table and — in his knockout move — punching her face after having some big trouble with an oversized lobster claw. From there, more hilarity ensues, all the way to the end of the film, where Drebin knocks Mrs. Bush over a railing, leaving her dangling as the end credits roll.

The Bush's children were scared of what their parents would think of the film, but Barbara told them "We saw it and I loved it and Dad loved it." Although she added, "The darn trouble is, she looks exactly like me. She has the pearls. She has the mannerisms. I recognized myself." Leslie Nielsen was worried too, but all was in good humor when he attended a White House function and even posed for a photo with the President and the First Lady.

The conversational genius of Tarantino was on full display from the first shot of his first feature, and especially in its very first scene, perhaps inspired by Barry Levinson's seminal "Diner." 

A group of well-dressed color-named Misters (an amazing ensemble including the likes of Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi, Chris Penn, et al) sit around a round table, chatting and chewing, oozing cool quotable dialogue with each passing and cutting sentence that is verbalized. Topics ranged from the true meaning behind Madonna's "Like A Virgin," to remembering a last name in an address book, to the very concept of whether tipping a server is mandatory. Cue the world's smallest violin.

As the "ramblers" are about to "get ramblin", Steven Wright's monotone voice takes us out as DJ K-Billy and his Super Sounds of the '70s, leading into one of the most memorable opening credit sequences of the '90s. Which was borrowed, with love, five years later in another seminal Miramax film: "Swingers."

Tarantino broke down his opening scene with a "cinéma-vérité give and take" to Film Comment in 1994, explaining how each of the three discussions held within it were shot in different styles. He said, "Whenever you do a scene that long, you have it break it down into sections. Ten minutes for your opening sequence is a real long ... time, especially if they're doing nothing but sitting down talking."

Sometimes the next generation needs a history lesson on the previous one; the greatest generation's WWII sacrifices got a long overdue refresher for all generations going forward from one of modern's cinema's finest filmmakers: Steven Spielberg. In his 1994 five time Academy Award winning "Ryan," Spielberg not only shows the audience the horrors of war, he makes them feel it with the unflinching, audiovisual techniques of a master.

Technically, the first scene of "Ryan" features an elderly man visiting Normandy American Cemetery in France during the present day, trembling in front of the sight of endless rows of his fellow fallen freedom fighters, interred under white crosses; when it cuts from a close up of his tears to the US army landing on Omaha Beach, the film truly begins. What follows is the unbelievable 20-plus minute Normandy Beach invasion that is not only one of the greatest openings of '90s movies, but of all time — a history lesson no one should forget.

The scene alone cost $12 million to produce, and included the talents of 1,500 people, a lot of explosives and endless fake blood, splashed about an Irish beach (via Independent). Spielberg told the DGA in 2011, "I was trying to honor the experience of what these veterans articulated to me. Their descriptions of the bloody beach really stuck in my memory," adding "I chose to acquit those factual experiences with imagery that I never censored or even questioned. My intention was to re-sensitize the audience."

It took seven long years before director James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger went back to "The Terminator" for 1991's "Judgment Day." The wait was worthwhile; it is perhaps one of the finest sequels ever made. Everything in the follow-up was bigger and badder, and in an audio commentary, writer William Wisher joked that the opening scene "cost as much as the entire first film."

The scene begins in modern Los Angeles — cars on a highway, followed by children enjoying a playground — before the sunny day is eclipsed by a hellish future darkness, showing it all burned to a crisp, as we learn of a nuclear fire that killed three billions lives in 1997. The ensuing nightmarish war against the machines was dubbed "Judgment Day," and the battle still rages on in 2029, in an unforgettable prelude which includes a first time on-screen appearance by the leader of the resistance: Sarah Connor's son, John. 

"I always really loved this sequence — as small as it is in the overall context of the film," Wisher says in the film's audio commentary. "To be able to see John Connor ... was really important, because it makes him real."

An alternate ending to the film, which was never used, would have acted as the perfect bookend to that impressive opening scene. It's a utopian time, with "the dark future that never came," and while Sarah Connor lives with knowledge of the horror of what could have been, she is still able to enjoy a bit of peace watching her son and granddaughter live and be free ... on a playground.

A low angle shot of a busy city sidewalk pops on screen, a pair of thieves hit the ground running, joined by the mashing drumbeat of Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life," as a narrator chimes in with a "choose life" monologue so momentous it warranted its own movie poster, and it's off to the races in Danny Boyle's 1996 big screen adaptation of Irvine Welsh's chic, sick heroin novel "Trainspotting." With this ultra-punchy, frenetic opening, the principal characters are all introduced (in various states of either high-highs or high-lows, plus a lot of talk about Sean Connery's career), and yells as if to say — you ain't seen nothing yet. 

Scottish cinema was instantly put on the map, and a welcome party was thrown for a new generation of great actors, including Ewan McGregor, Johnny Lee Miller, Robert Carylyle and Shirley Henderson. Boyle would later joke to Miller that the film was so popular back home that "'Trainspotting' is like Scotland's 'Star Wars.'"

The chase scene in the opener was shot using a quad bike on Princes Street in Edinburgh, Scotland, and had the actors lost for breath (much like the audience watching them). Producer Andrew Macdonald recalled to The Scotsman, "It was complete naivety. People were just jumping or being pushed out of the way. There was no crowd control. Just crazy, we could have killed someone." Director Boyle added, "You'd never get permission to film this way now," but luckily they did, and paid homage to the opening chase in  a 2017 sequel.