Seems to me half of all the films I see these days begin with some sort of action-packed, bizarre, confusing scene that lasts ten minutes or so, and then we get a card that says “TWO WEEKS EARLIER” and then the film begins in chronological order.
This trope might have been intriguing the first time I saw it used, or the tenth, but hasn’t it become an annoying cliche? I’m all for “In Medias Res” plots as much as the next guy, but this is just a clumsy expository way to tell a story: open up at a mysterious point in the movie and then assure the viewer that, OK, you’re about to explain how this weird scene came to take place.
It’s an artifact of the notion that you’ve got 18 seconds to hook your audience so you can’t start the story at the beginning. Writers do it too.
It’s also somewhat related to the time-hopping non-linear trend in story-telling (movies and books alike), in which a tale is told not as it unfolded but as a pastiche of what happened in 1986 and what’s happening in 2023 (and occasionally on more than two timelines to bounce back and forth between).
This is being largely driven by the streaming revolution. One of the things that’s emerged from the ongoing writers strike is revelations that Netflix execs et al. tell their showrunners and moviemakers to subordinate themselves to the all powerful viewer metrics. If someone watches past ninety seconds, apparently, they’re much more likely to watch the whole thing. So that first minute, minute and a half is everything.
It’s a very different world compared to the one where you plunk down for a ticket and find your seat and then it takes a lot for you to give up and leave. In that world, the movie as a whole is what matters. Now, every minute has to keep engaging and hooking and pulling you along, even if it means the movie as a whole doesn’t make sense and adds up to nothing in the end.
I don’t like the new world. I prefer the old world.
But it’s not stranger–it’s perfectly normal at this point. It’s practically boring. I’m not intrigued by it, I’m just waiting for the chronological version of the film to start.
You are absolutely right. I hate it, and I always go into FOMO mode when it happens, worrying that I may miss clues or important details. Not to mention that when the film eventually makes a leap from the past to the future that the film started with but after the opening scene, I find that I’d already forgotten what the opening scene was about! :
If this is true, I suspect that it’s partly just because it’s become fashionable and partly for the reason @Cervaise described; and I’d agree with you that it’s overused. I don’t want a movie (or novel, or TV series) to begin with an “action-packed, bizarre, confusing scene,” because I don’t find action scenes particularly interesting unless I know what’s happening and to whom and why it matters.
That’s very common in the middle-brow mystery novels I read - or read when I used to have time for such luxuries. It can seem a little forced at times, but when reading a “yarn” (as opposed to highbrow literature) it can seem a bit plodding if the narrative simply goes “this happened. Next, this happened. Then this, then this and this. The end.”
So, I kind of like it in books. It allows a mystery to unravel gradually as the reader learns more context - what happened in 1986 might not be significant unless you know what happened in 2020.
Both seasons of The White Lotus started this way, and I did like how it was used for misdirection in season 1. Everything about the opening scene leads the viewer to believe Shane’s wife is going to die at some point. But she doesn’t… someone else dies.
Oh, that’s depressing. Though I guess not terribly different than writers having ten pages to hook agents. I swear that first ten pages get rewritten more than any other part of a book.
Do people really decide whether or not to watch something in the first 90 seconds? In my household we employ the ten minute rule.
Evil Dead Rise had a particularly gratuitous cold open of this type - it had essentially nothing to do with the rest of the story and none of the characters in it appeared again until the final seconds of the film. Seemed like just a cheap way to sneak some gore into the first few minutes of the movie. (Not that there’s EVER a bad time for gore in an Evil Dead movie, of course.)
Except these stories are perfectly linear except for the out of order teaser. I’ve seen a bunch on TV, they mostly make us think the lead character is about to get killed.
The way they are done reminds me more of serial cliffhangers. Flash is tied up in the rocket, the rocket explodes. Oops, we didn’t show you him getting out before it happens.
Actually I like this trope. A lot of procedurals and detective stories are in essence like that: someone was killed and we try to piece together the who and how and why. When they do this in a TV-series once in a while it is always fun as it mixes the format up, even if the episode would also work without this trope (for instance Lucifer, Expire Erect). The trope can serve to highlight the surprise of the situation that would not be noticeable if the episode was entirely presented in chronological order.
I fully agree. Happily this kind of algorithm optimalisation tell the viewer the work is in the modern day equivalent of “straight to video”category and should be treated accordingly.
I don’t mind this sort of 2 weeks earlier thing, I think starting in media res is how most movies should be done. How else - or what else - would be a better approach?
