50 Greatest Movie Scenes Ever
23. Opening Montage - Up
Ask just about anyone, and they'll tell you that the rest of Up fails to live up to the opening sequence. And, well, it is true, but that's not the film's fault. The majority of Up is a superb adventure that soars like a house carried by balloons. It's just that the opening montage is ASTONISHING.
Showing us the relationship of Carl and Ellie, from their first meeting to their final parting, through all the adventures they didn't get to have and the ones they did, it's a gorgeous sequence that cuts to the very nature of romantic relationships, both the highs and the lows. Up invites you to laugh along as the pair fall in love, and to cry as they discover they can't have children.
Pixar is always at its best when it takes something very human - and very adult - and packages it into something that appeals to all generations, and there's no greater cross-generational appeal in animation than this cross-generational story. It's one of the fullest romances ever seen on screen, it's life and death and love and loss and every little thing in between, and it does it all in just a few minutes, without a word being spoken. If you're not a blubbering mess by the end of it, it's probably because you're already dead.
[JH]
22. T-Rex Attack - Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park’s first big action moment (apart from the prologue, of course) is clever on two fronts, as well as being some of the most stunning spectacle film-making of all time.
First off, it works because of everything Steven Spielberg learned from Jaws. The build is all about atmosphere and not showing something until a climax that makes the audience’s heart burst out of their chest. And yet, it comes after Spielberg did his big dinosaur reveal, so the very fact that it works as a SECOND “holy sh*t” reveal moment is even more impressive.
The scene is Spielberg’s threat film-making at its very best, dialling into innate fears and the fantastic at the same time. There’s just the right blend of heroism and human idiocy and as grizzly as it is, the one big death involved has a comedic note. Even decades on, the effects also stand up incredibly well, which is some going.
[SG]
21. Jack Rabbit Slim's - Pulp Fiction
Pulp Fiction is one of the defining movies of the 90s, so packed with amazing scenes and Tarantino finesse that it’s hard to select just one moment that can be attributed as ‘the best’ - but there’s one scene that has stood the test of time like nothing else.
The Jack Rabbit Slim’s dance competition is so bizarrely placed in a film about violence and drugs that it instantly grabs your attention as something special. Preempted with a conversation that expertly sets up a tangible tension between Mia Wallace and Vincent Vega, Mia’s demand to dance serves as a physical outlet to the pair’s electric ‘comfortable silence’, and offers a piece of indulgent respite for their bizarre situation of a coked-up mob wife being guarded by an armed criminal.
Bringing together a 50s diner, a 60s dance, and a very 70s John Travolta reliving his Saturday Night Fever heydey, there’s a strange sense of celebration for the washed up actor as he dances his way into the spotlight once more - using the physicality that made him famous in the first place as a meta commentary on his place in the industry.
There’s no words needed within the movie, and it’s as self-aware as it is a lighthearted moment of two souls connecting on a pre-packaged retro dance floor. That Mia and Vincent’s dance has lived on in pop culture for years, from songs to idle references to recreations, only serves to reinforce how delightfully poignant such a moment of humans connecting on a basic level can be. It’s all that’s needed.
[Ash Millman]