LONDON: In years to come, people will be talking about the 2012 London Olympics about the Opening Ceremony, which athlete won a gold medal and who broke the record and so on.
This is what most people do when they try to recall Olympic games. But the London 2012 will be different.
Records will always be broken, athletes will come and go, but we will never see anything like this Opening Ceremony ever again.
In London right now, people are said to be talking about the amazing Opening Ceremony, even though the Olympics is finally underway.
It was like a party you never wanted to end, a book you didn't want to finish.
Over the past week Oscar winner Danny Boyle, the man who conceived and nurtured the extravaganza like a father with a favourite child, had revealed more and more of his masterpiece.
After what we saw on TV, an estimated four billion people around the world now know that “little” is not a word to be used in connection with a Danny Boyle production.
In just 90 minutes through a compilation of verse, music, dance, live action and film, he managed to tell a country's history and capture its people's heart and humour in unforgettable style.
The industrial revolution segment, in which an army of extras transformed a pristine English country village into a smoke-belching factory estate, set new standards for big arena productions in terms of execution and drama.
Boyle never made any secret of the fact that he hoped to capture the same irreverent, self-deprecating party mood of the Sydney Olympic Opening Ceremony.
He achieved it, and more.
Boyle's vision was extraordinary in its scope; audacious in its imagination and at times it’s cheeky humour made Sydney seem positively stodgy in comparison.
The parts of the show that had never been seen by anyone except the tightest inner circle were funnier, more irreverent and, ultimately more mind-blowing than anyone – except a genius like Danny Boyle – could even contemplate.
It was, in the vernacular of Danny Boyle's professional world, the “money shot”, but he still had one more trick up his sleeve. The lighting of the cauldron and after Steve Redgrave carried the flame to the stadium; it was going to have to be big.
The cauldron was surrounded by athletes in the middle of the stadium and a number of torches came together to light the centrepiece of the Opening Ceremony.
It was big. Britain's future, representing its past.
If it was a Danny Boyle movie it would have faded out, the words The End filling the screen.
But it was just the beginning. – AAP
Photo courtesy of Herald Sun.
