Steven Spielberg has been revered by film buffs and casual moviegoers alike since his directing career begin in the ‘70s. Bursting onto the scene with his first breakout hit Jaws in 1975, effectively birthing the summer blockbuster (for better or for worse), Spielberg has continued to revolutionize Hollywood filmmaking for decades.
He’s made all kinds of movies: historical dramas, biopics, action movies, science-fiction, suspense. Spielberg is a master of visual storytelling, and a large part of that is opening his movies with the perfect shot to immerse us in each story’s world straight away. So, here are Steven Spielberg’s 10 Best Opening Shots, Ranked.
The Post
Although a lot of his contemporaries, like Francis Ford Coppola and John Milius, tackled the Vietnam War on the big screen while it was still raging, Spielberg avoided explicitly commenting on the conflict in his films until 2017. The Post is really the story of the Washington Post’s battle with the Nixon administration and the power of the free press, but it opens on a U.S. Army base in Vietnam’s Hau Nghia Province in 1966.
In a frenzied handheld shot that just points at whatever’s going on in front of it, more like a documentary than a docudrama, we see soldiers gearing up, assembling rifles, watching helicopters fly overhead – it’s hectic.
Jurassic Park
Steven Spielberg doles out new information with every shot in the opening scene of Jurassic Park, slowly building up the suspense. It opens close on some trees, obscuring something. That something is tearing the trees out of the way, thundering towards us, bellowing booming noises. A couple of closeups then introduce terrified men wearing hard hats bearing the Jurassic Park logo. Some of them are armed.
Then, a wider shot reveals the thing that was ripping through the trees: a large truck, carrying a heavy-duty cage. It slowly becomes apparent that there’s a dinosaur in the cage, and these guys aren’t equipped to handle it.
Catch Me If You Can
Spielberg’s biopic of notorious con artist Frank Abagnale, Jr. opens with real footage from his appearance on the game show To Tell the Truth. Leonardo DiCaprio is inserted into the footage, but everyone else featured is from the actual show from 1977. Opening a movie in 4:3 aspect ratio with footage from a ‘70s game show was an unexpected and inspired move by Spielberg.
Abagnale’s subsequent explanation that he got away with impersonating a doctor, a lawyer and a pilot hooks us in for his unbelievable story. And it is unbelievable. So unbelievable, in fact, that this opening was necessary to really establish that.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Essentially, E.T. is a movie about the power of friendship. But it’s also one of the few movies that tells us we might not be alone in the universe that isn’t alarmed by that prospect. It depicts alien visitors in a positive light. In fact, in the opening scene, it’s the humans who are hostile. The aliens are scared off by gun-toting cops, leaving E.T. behind.
It’s appropriate that the movie begins with a pan down from the night sky, filled with stars, that settles on a familiar forest landscape. It symbolizes E.T.’s arrival on Earth from up there. It also straps us in for a movie that brings science-fiction concepts to our doorstep.
Saving Private Ryan
Spielberg’s WWII epic Saving Private Ryan, the one that induced PTSD attacks in war veterans, opens and closes with the same image: an American flag, blowing in the wind, color-graded with a very bleak, washed-out palette. Some critics have called these shots contradictory to the movie’s message. Saving Private Ryan is poised as an unpatriotic, anti-war film, yet it’s impossible to see the American flag as anything other than patriotic. The desaturated colors could be seen as Spielberg having his cake and eating it, too.
But his message is more complex than that. This movie isn’t necessarily anti-America, but young, unprepared, terrified boys were shipped off to war to fight for that flag. It’s also worth noting that this particular flag can be found at the cemetery near Omaha Beach where the film’s framing narrative takes place. The flag can be seen as a symbol of liberty anywhere else, but in this cemetery, it can also be blamed for all those graves.
Munich
Munich, Spielberg’s cinematic retelling of Operation Wrath of God, the Israeli government’s response to the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, opens with an intricate tracking shot that frames each of its components perfectly. It opens on a gate, then two hands appear on it and a man climbs up to peer over. When the rest of his group arrives, he drops from the gate to join them. This is all conveyed through camera movements and angles, courtesy of cinematographer Janusz Kamiński.
What follows is an intense dramatization of the massacre, in which the Black September terrorist group takes 11 members of the Israeli Olympics team hostage before killing them. The carefully planned opening shot reflects the carefully planned attack we’re about to see play out.
Bridge of Spies
The Cold War thriller Bridge of Spies opens with Rudolf Abel, technically the film’s antagonist, looking at himself in the mirror in his cramped New York apartment. As the camera pans out, we realize he’s trying to capture all of his own features in a self-portrait he’s painting. In a matter of seconds, Spielberg establishes that this is a mild-mannered man with a solitary existence.
He is later revealed to be a Soviet spy. The American press vilifies him as his appointed lawyer, James Donovan, agrees to fairly argue his case in court. This opening shot captures the nuances of Mark Rylance’s performance as Abel.
Schindler’s List
Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s harrowing cinematic portrait of the horrors of the Holocaust, opens with a completely black frame. Then, a match is struck, dimly illuminating the fingers holding it as it lights a candle.
The totally black frame could be read to represent the bleak reality of living in Nazi-occupied Poland, while the match could be seen to represent the beacon of hope that emerges in the form of Oskar Schindler, when he comes to his senses, renounces the Nazi Party, and uses his resources to save 1,200 Jews from concentration camps. The majority of this three-hour epic is shot in black-and-white, but it opens in color. It only turns to black-and-white when that candle burns out.
Jaws
Jaws opens with a point-of-view tracking shot through the ocean. It could be the point-of-view of the shark, but it looks a lot like the point-of-view of a snorkeler. When we watch this scene as an audience member, we’re taken back to memories of swimming in the ocean. With John Williams’ ominous score playing over it, building suspense, we’re terrified.
The camera deliberately points down, so we can’t see what’s ahead. A 25-foot great white shark, or any other terror that the ocean has to offer, could be lurking around anywhere. As far as opening title sequences go, this is quite riveting.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
All of the Indiana Jones movies have an inventive opening shot that matches the Paramount logo. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s a distant mountain shrouded by jungle mist. In Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, when things went off the rails, it’s a pile of dirt, complete with a computer-generated gopher.
Steven Spielberg opened Raiders with the perfect shot to introduce the tone of the film. And then, he created a cinematic icon (with the help of Harrison Ford) as Indiana Jones strides into frame with a bullwhip hanging off his belt, wearing his signature fedora. He’d be etched in audiences’ minds for decades.
