Casino royale's opening scene portrays a darker side to Bond giving us insight into the theme of the movie a darker side to the Bond genre. It doesn't give us many plot points or anything for that mater yet shows us that Bond is a lot more darker than previously thought.
The scene is in black and white which makes most of the scene primarily hidden in the shadows this allows the theme of the movie to be presented. The opening itself has almost no relevance to the rest of the film it primarily focuses upon showing Bond become more darker than previous incarnations.
Directors do not want to give away major plot devices in the first minute or so of the movie yet sometimes within the opening there are hints towards the story.
This is the case in the opening of Se7en where the intro is cryptic giving us a hint on the theme of the movie yet it portrays a person carefully organizing something being steady with his/her movements. the intro in Se7en gives away the identity of the villain within the intro, however the viewer doesn't notice the subtle hints. such as the person pictured having a the equipment to render photographs showing that he/she works with cameras in some way.
Se7en also introduces us to the characters, the director wants us to become somewhat attached to a particular character, we learn or we think we learn a fair amount of info about the two police officers during the intro however over the course of the movie our perspectives of them change almost always occurring after multiple events. The opening of this film uses a future event (Sommersets retirement) to create attachment to characters.
The Third Man's intro is fairly upbeat and joyous however at the same time introduces a dark side to the city the movie is set in. The director uses the sets in a way which makes the city look normal and war free yet it is constantly at war. the director wants to give us a oblivious lead character which also set the theme of the film by showing that he has no idea what it going on and throughout the film finally works his way through the hints. This movies introduction purposely gets us confused as we have seemingly missed out on a lot of detail regarding how or what got the character to go to Vienna.
Films like Alice Creed use the intro to set a mystery into the movie. the two people at the beginning seem to have completely thought their plan out and by using the movies title as a hint sets them up for the rest of the film. The director purposely positioned the two characters in a way to make them seem fluent yet remain anonymous to us, this is done by them not having much dialogue at all during the opening. The opening takes place in many different areas at multiple different times but they all interlink by the characters main goal.
Sin city's director seemed to want to portray the man at the beginning to seem calm, confident and fluent in his actions yet still have a dangerous factor to him. The set around him and the woman is dull and boring with limited lighting around it. This portrays the theme that the movie is going to be dark and dangerous. However the opening takes place in a single area, not much of the surrounding area is seen at all, which establishes that anything like this could be happening at any point at any time. The lack of scene as well seems to portray a feeling of claustrophobia which would establish to the viewer that this city is crammed and dangerous, with no escape.
This here is a thriller "cobweb" portraying what was good and not so good about the openings of certain movies, the wider the hexagon the more detailed the film intro. For example "Alice creed"establishes pretty much everything very well it gave a lot of information within the first couple of minutes.
using this "Web" gives people an indication of whether or not a movie establishes certain factors.
The cobweb lists all the things that together make a perfect thriller opening and acts as a guide as well as giving guidance upon examples of films that do it well. Using this is crucial for our thriller openings as it gives us a huge amount of information and devices in which we could use. This cobweb also informs us about what the common features of openings are and what is important and what isn't.
From analysing the openings of several movies i can see that plot isn't really a huge factor however theme, genre and location are almost always key. the plot is meant to unravel as the movie goes along, revealing all plot points too soon ruins the flow of the movie.
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