This opening and the synth music inspired me as a 9 year old boy to become a designer of worlds and that is what I do today for a living as an artist - Conceptual Design, Fine Art and even real Architectural Concept Design for modern buildings. I always LOVED that introduction!!
It's a very inspiring film but its a shame the tv version you saw isn't for sale as the cinema version has too much nudity for kids. So that can't be shown to them. The nudity adds zero and is totally unnecessary imo.
So badass and epic, the music builds to a magnificent crescendo as the camera creeps up, from the foggy wilderness, to a pleasure dome beyond imagination...there's just one catch.
I always considered this opening to be a darker version of the Krypton reveal in the 1978 Superman movie. Both movies begin with a slow approach to magnificent cities in a vast landscape. Even the music presents the worlds as opposites... here Jerry Goldsmith gives the domes a majestic but ominously treatment (reflecting the cold, sterile world inside) while John Williams gave Krypton a clearly more heroic and inspirational introduction.
This opening always to me felt at once impossibly futuristic... and utterly dated. One of my favourite films since I was a child and I will never tire of it.
Thank you for posting this. I love this movie. I own it on blu ray ... but I just wanted to see the intro and you posted it. One of the best intros ever. You da MVP sir
This movie won an academy award for its special effects, despite so many of the effects shots looking not only fake but poorly shot. The lack of deep-focus photography of the miniatures is the worst offender, ruining the sense of scale intended.
speeta Yeah, I think the miniatures themselves look fine. They’re just shot in a way that’s obviously someone moving a normal camera over them by hand.
This is the studio that made 2001: A Space Odyssey which demonstrated the proper technique for deep-focus miniature photography. I'm amazed the VFX supervisors here didn't copy that successful technique. Granted, it's difficult and time-consuming to get right. Perhaps they couldn't get the trick to work for them (pinhole aperture, precisely tracked camera movement, lots of lighting and long exposure time for every frame) and had to settle for these shots to get the film finished on time/budget.
I agree. There were more convincing things being done even at the time this was made. In addition to the focus issues is the problem of the water. The scale and speed of movement of the waves were immediate giveaways that you were looking at a model city.
Well, they didn't have ILM yet; they were too busy driving forklifts into things in Van Nuys while George Lucas was shooting "Episode IV" in Tunisia. He went apeshit when he got back to the US and they had less than ten minutes of usable footage for 18 months' work... But yes, there were some cringeworthy shots here. But still, with the budget MGM gave them, this was probably the best they could do. And in a pre-"Star Wars" era, they could get away with it.
This really didn't stand the test of time.. the shaky camera moves.. the bad lighting.. compare it to Bladerunner.. which came out "only" 6 years later and partially used the same tech.. I like the movie but man this.. oh man..
