8 Utterly Boring Openings That Spoiled Great Movies

8. Pacific Rim

Opening credits have been a mainstay of cinema since the very beginning. Although over time as productions grew in size they€™ve become less comprehensive (that€™s what those new fangled end credits are for), some directors are done with them all together. George Lucas famously took a new tact Star Wars€™ 1930€™s serial-invoking opening crawl, while Christopher Nolan hasn€™t used them since Insomnia (and has made a trait out of only showing the title card at the very end). Guillermo Del Toro€™s method is a little different. Instead, he uses the first fifteen minutes before the title card of some of his films as a prologue, like a feature length TV episode. The problem with that is immediately obvious; while a viewer can turn off from a TV show at any time, in a cinema your options are severely limited. It's not like you can change the channel €“ you're sat in a dark room with popcorn, after all. You're already plenty hooked. It doesn€™t really matter though, as long there€™s something interesting to grab you in that first quarter of an hour. This technique was well used in Hellboy, which managed to pack all the origin story you needed (as well as some plot set-up), but in last year€™s Pacific Rim it felt stretched. There€™s insane amounts of exposition (good), followed by a meet-and-greet with our human characters (predictable) and an action sequence that should have your inner child screaming, but instead has you trying to convince yourself it is. It's too aimless for such a risky film.
Contributor
Contributor

Film Editor (2014-2016). Loves The Usual Suspects. Hates Transformers 2. Everything else lies somewhere in the middle. Once met the Chuckle Brothers.