20 Greatest Opening Movie Scenes Of All Time

6. Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds Opening
Lantern Entertainment

Much like Quentin Tarantino's other films, Inglourious Basterds (the director's 2009 tribute to war movies) wastes no time at all in creating the tensest atmosphere possible, focusing the action on a farmer in northern France as he protects Jewish fugitives from the Vichy government and Colonel Hans Landa's SS brigade.

The palpability of the scene's tension is made clear right from the off, with Ennio Morricone's score implicating a sense of tragic inevitability even before Landa has arrived.

Christoph Waltz too is utterly unsettling as the Austrian, and while the audience is allowed to think - for just one second - that he's unaware of the men and women hiding underneath the farmer's floorboards, it's made clear that he knew all along. It makes the back and forth between the Colonel and his victim all the more menacing, with the scene coming to an end in a hail of gunfire and in the miraculous escape of Mélanie Laurent's Shosanna Dreyfus, who assumes a new identity in Paris shortly afterwards.

It's the catalyst that triggers Dreyfus' quest for revenge, and while Tarantino doesn't bring all of Inglourious' individual stories together until the film's climactic (and bloody) final act, the opening confrontation with Landa lingers throughout, eclipsing the Colonel's other heinous transgressions through to his scarring at the hands of Aldo Raine in its closing moments.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.