analysing 3 opening sequences

Upside Down 

"Upside Down" has a very intresting opening sequence where after the narrator explains the theory behind the two worlds we get an extreme long shot of the two worlds. Instantly we understand that there is another world upside down contrasting the world below which is all destroyed and very badly treated. Meanwhile the world above is all futuristic and well developed. Next, we get another extreme long shot that shows us the only way that the two worlds are connected. That tower in the middle was created to take cheap oil from "down below"and transport it up to keep the upper world's economy running. We understand this through the narrator who explains to us the setting and the reason why that connection tower is there.

In the next scene we understand that the person narrating and giving us all that information about the two worlds is the main character in the film. He tells us he grew up in an orphanage and shows us flashbacks of his past. So basically before the actual romance starts he tells us his background information and how he grew up as a child, how he lost his parents. Most of the camera angles are extreme long shots, focusing on the environment    
                                                                                    that the main character lived in.

American Pie Reunion

American Pie Reunion, for sure one of the funniest movies I have every seen has a funny feeling right off the start. The opening sequence starts off by showing us the clothes thrown on the ground in a bedroom, and on the background we can hear a bed creeking. The audience instantly assumes that there is a couple having sexual intercourse in the room, but we are surprised when the camera moves to the bed and reveals that the bed creeking sounds come from the mother while she is lulling her child to try to make him fall asleep. Meanswhile the dad is on his laptop simply ignoring all the environment around him. After the kid sleeps is put to bed, the camera pans to the left and follows the mother to the bathroom. She says she is going to take a shower. The husband thought it would be a great idea to masturbate so he opens his pornographic website. As the lady in the video repeatedly says "give it to me daddy"his son suddenly shows up in the room and completes the phrase by saying "daddy". Startled, the dad closes his computer on his own penis, and very clumsily tries to hide his actions. By this point the audience assumes that he is a busy guy and almost never has any private times for himself. Basically he doesn't have enough sex in his life, thus leading his to wanting to masturbate, and his desperation he got caught in an unfortunate moment by his son. The dad then realizes he is bleeding from his penis and he needs a band-aid, so he runs to the bathroom and finds his wife masturbating in the bath. In my opinion these series of random events actually make a movie more appealing, and also, it catches the attention of the audience right from the start.

The Amazing Spiderman

"The Amazing Spiderman" , a movie from 2012 starts off with a kid, whose identity is yet to be discovered. The kid is doing a countdown and when he reaches zero he says "ready or not, here I come". This suggests to the audience that he is playing hide and seek. All of this has been filmed in one close up. The camera then follows him down the stairs and starts following his to the sofa at his eye level. in one continuous shot the camera follows his to the curtains and films him opening them to check if there was somebody there. The scene is cut and then we get a closeup which slowly zooms towards him. The kid finds himself in what looks to be his dad's office and all the windows are open and the papers have been moved around, the room is a mess. This makes the audience predict that someone was in that room messing through his dad's papers. The kid calls his dad who instantly appears and grabs him. The dad then searches around the room to check if there is something missing while the mother grabs the kid and takes him away from the room. We then see a long shot of the dad erasing the board, it appears as if he is trying to clear some evidence. There were drawings on the board of spiders and lots of information about them. And last but not least, right before the opening sequence ends we get an extreme closeup of  a dead spider which appears to be part of his experiments because it is inside an experiment test tube for no one to touch it. This opening sequence is excellent because it gets the audience ready for the movie. It gives us some information about what's happening but still leaves us, the audience, with a sense of mystery, making us ask ourselves why is he so frustrated about a study of spiders. So basically this opening sequence grabs our attention and makes us wonder: What's going to happen next?