Film fans debate greatest opening scenes of all time – from ‘The Dark Knight’ to ‘Inglourious Basterds’

Film lovers have been debating what they believe are the greatest opening scenes of all time, with movies by Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg among the favourites.

The conversation was prompted by a Reddit user, who cited the opening of this year’s Deadpool & Wolverine as a standout. In that scene, Ryan Reynolds’ character resurrects his corpse to fight off a squadron of Time Variance Authority officers, set to *NSYNC’s ‘Bye Bye Bye’.

The comment opened up a discussion that took in countless classic movies, many of which have opening sequences that linger long in the memory.

One of the most popular replies came from a user who selected Tarantino’s 2009 World War II drama Inglourious Basterds. The opening scene of that film sees Christoph Waltz’s horrifying Nazi commander Hans Landa visit a rural farmhouse to pressure the residents into revealing if they are hiding Jewish people in their property. The slow build and nerve-shredding suspense of the scene makes it one of modern cinema’s most unforgettable film openings.

Another iconic scene mentioned in the discussion is the start of Spielberg’s Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981), featuring the legendary action sequence in which Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones navigates the booby-trapped ancient Peruvian temple to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant, eventually being chased by a giant rolling boulder.

Nolan’s beloved Batman film The Dark Knight (2008) was another choice that many agreed with. That film begins with a meticulously planned bank heist, with a series of robbers all dressed as the Joker working together and then turning on each other. Heath Ledger’s character has laid a series of traps to leave him as the last man standing, and he utters the famous line, “I believe whatever doesn’t kill you simply makes you…stranger”.

Other films to get a mention include The Matrix’s state-of-the-art opening action sequence and Apocalypse Now’s napalm-infested Vietnamese jungle opening, set to The Doors’ ‘The End’.

The harrowing opening sequence on the beaches in Normandy in Saving Private Ryan (1998) was another to receive a lot of up-votes, as was the masterclass in tension that introduces Nicolas Winding Refn’s modern classic Drive (2011), in which Ryan Gosling’s getaway driver navigates an escape from a heist in downtown Los Angeles, set to Cliff Martinez’s pulsing score.

The tearjerking montage that opens up Pixar’s Up (2008) was another popular choice, in which Carl and Ellie’s lifespan and relationship is covered in a matter of minutes, while a more niche selection that a lot of Reddit users agreed with was X-Men 2 (2003), in which Alan Cumming’s Nightcrawler infiltrates the White House by using his teleportation abilities to evade security, and attempts to assassinate the president.

See the full list of replies in the Reddit thread here.

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