10 Movies That Should've Scrapped Their Opening Scene

Not unlike Skyline, the recent Tom Holland-starring Uncharted adaptation opens in medias res in spectacularly pointless fashion, beginning with a two-minute mid-air action sequence as Nathan Drake (Holland) is ejected from a cargo plane.

This is pulled from a much later scene at the end of the second act, and at a pivotal peak in the action we suddenly cut to a flashback featuring younger versions of Nate (Tiernan Jones) and his brother Sam (Rudy Pankow).

Even accepting that the second version of the cargo plane sequence later in the movie is far more elaborate and offers a different perspective of the action, it still feels like the filmmakers weren't confident enough to start the story off with a flashback, and so decided to give the audience a rather lazy taste of the mayhem to come.

Though the Uncharted games have also used this trope - most famously, Uncharted 2's opening train carriage sequence - the effect is very different in a video game, where you're an active participant in what's going on, compared to the more passive experience of watching a movie.

It "hits different," as the kids say these days, in cinematic form, and really just feels like the movie is wasting our time getting into the meat of the story when it could simply keep this scene where it belongs later on.