I watched the Red Dwarf episode ‘Ouroboros’ today, and I liked the way they set up the first scene so that it revealed the general plot of the episode, plus the ending, in a subtle way at the very start of the episode.
[spoiler] You see a man find a baby, who we know to be Dave Lister, in a box under a pool table at a bar. The box has ‘OUROBOROS’ written on it. If you know the meaning of the Ouroboros symbol this is enough, in the very first scene, to figure out what the remainder of the plot is going to be, in general terms.
Somehow find a woman
2 Make a baby
3 That baby will be Lister himself, and he will have to go back and put the baby back where he was found.[/spoiler]
Any good examples of openings that lay the rest of the plot out, especially the ending, if you’re smart enough to notice?
Two films where the plot were given away in the opening voiceover were The Dark Crystal and Dark City. Those who have seen the latter will warn newbies to leave the sound off until Keifer Sutherland appears. In neither film was the narration needed.
The opening scene in Sunset Boulevard reveals how the movie ends for the hero.
That plot device has been used in TV for years. Any number of series have had at least one episode where you see the protaganists in a dire situation and then the storyline rewinds to show you how they got into the predicament in the first place.
Would you count “Memento”? Since the movie is told in reverse chronological order the first scene you see is the end (more or less), and the rest of the movie is delving backwards, revealing the plot as it goes.
I think most of these don’t really fill the bill for what the OP proposed – he’s not asking about movies where you know how it’s going to end, or movies that open with the ending scene. He’s asking for movies where the opening scene gives away the entire plot (This is distinct from giving away the ending. If you don’t know why, go back to English Literature class.)
I kind of felt as if the movie poster virtually gave away the plot for willard (the original version). I walked into the theater with my cousin and he asked me, “You know how this is going to go, right?” and i answered “Yeah.” And we were right. We really did pretty much know how the movie was going to go, and end. But it wasn’t the opening scene that gave it away.
In Grave of the Fireflies the two main characters are shown to have died in the first scene, since it contains the dead body of one and the ashes of the other.
A friend of mine went to see Titanic while “back home” over the holidays. A few minutes into the movie one of his particularly clueless relatives said very loudly "Don’t tell me that boat sinks! :eek:
Good one. Shakespeare liked to make things clear with a prologue, or a soliloquy, eh? How about from Richard III:
“. . . I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;–
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun,
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore,–since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,–
I am determined to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other:
. . .”
Richard tells us right off the bat that he’s a mean bastard and he’s going to stir up a lot of trouble before he’s through. And he delivers!