10 Mysterious Movie Openings That Left You Begging For More

The opening scene to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the most famous, and most iconic movie openings in the history of cinema. It’s not often you get an opening scene that lasts an entire nine minutes and is almost completely separate from the rest of the film, but this was certainly the case here.

Audiences in 1968 would have had every right to expect a movie with such a title to be about the exploration of space, and just as much right to be utterly baffled that the first nine minutes depicted a group of apes long before evolving into humans.

In the presence of an alien monolith, mysterious and ominous in its own right, the creatures set about learning how to use tools, and ultimately utilising bones as weapons to become dominant over others. It almost acts as its own story within the movie.

Until one ape throws the bone he used as a club into the air for it to transition into a ship floating through space, there was absolutely no way of connecting the two narratives. Even after the transition, audiences were no clearer as to what the hell was going on, but something as weird as that monolith and a seemingly completely random story about apes millions of years ago inspired a huge amount of intrigue.