I give up. I’m paused at 3:23 and what am I looking for?
Travolta
I submit:
2001: A Space Odyssey
Once Upon a Time in the West
Inglorious Basterds
In fairness, if we are eliminating Saving Private Ryan’s battle scene as not being the first scene, GSgt Hartman berating the recruits isn’t the first scene in that movie, either.
Melancholia. Beautiful and terrible.
I think I posted this one in the last thread, but my personal favourite (apart from maybe the SPR scene) is the opening of Contact
Oh that’s amazing.
Actually, I found that scene (and the one at the end) quite moviing; the old man is visiting, perhaps for the first time, the grave of someone who died so that he could live. And he’s feeling survivor’s guilt or at least wondering if the life he led since then was worth the sacrifice.
Psycho (1960): The slow pan and zoom of the Phoenix skyline eventually settling on a hotel room and winding up inside of it.
Oooh, I agree. I think this is Quentin Tarantino’s best movie and that opening still sends chills down my spine.
Meh, it’s a rip of Eames’Powers of Ten, and the scale (both the visual scale and thte radio signals) is completely wrong.
The greatest single opening scene in film is the Sergio Leone’s Once Upon The Time In The West, with the three gunmen waiting for “Harmonica” to arrive. It also has one of the best entrances of a villian. “What are we going to do with this one, Frank?” “Now that you’ve called me by name?”
Stranger
Robert Altman’s The Player is famous for its opening shot, a tracking shot that lasts about eight minutes.
That’s the one I thought of, and probably what I responded with in earlier threads (if I responded at all).
I see I’m a little late with my choice of “Once Upon A Time in the West”. Great.
(It’s probably easier to have a good beginning for a film than a good ending., I’m thinking. Casablanca being an exception of course.)
Raiders of the Lost Ark - Indy retrieving the golden idol from the booby-trapped cave.
That’s not the opening.
The Dawn of Man opens and we see the primative humans and they are not doing well. They have no water, they get attacked by the leopard, then the monolith appears and they all freak out to weird ass music and finally one of them touches it. Later the monolith gives one of them the idea for the club to Also sprach Zarathurstra.
My nomination is the opening of The Usual Suspects. You don’t know it but it tells you who Soyze is.
I couldn’t disagree more. There are a lot of great endings. There are only a handful of really great movie beginnings.
Lion King. Duh. 
Evil Dead 3: Medieval Dead - “My Name is Ash, and I’m a slave…” <cue whips>
Please, a zoom out is ripping off now? The whole point of the Contact scene is to the radio broadcasts, which despite any inaccuracies, is used to show how the noise our species has been making doesn’t get anywhere close to where intelligent life may be.
None of which was a part of “Powers of Ten”.