Remembering Danny Boyle's Crazy, Beautiful, Movie-Obsessed Opening Ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics

Mary Poppinses descend from the sky in London on July 27, 2012. (Photo: Getty Images)

Like executing a high dive or handspring, directing the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics is not a job for the faint-hearted. The four-hour production comes with nearly impossible demands: It must simultaneously convey the pride and achievements of the host city, celebrate international harmony, and elicit gasps of astonishment from every corner of the world. Danny Boyle achieved all that and more at the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London, which boasted an Opening Ceremony that was not just technically ingenious but also funny, inspiring, and occasionally downright bonkers. As the 2016 Rio Games kick off tonight on NBC, we thought we’d take a look back at the British director’s pop-culture-inspired Olympic lovefest. (Watch it all here.)

One year after winning his Best Director Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle accepted the challenge of directing the Opening Ceremony in London. An intimidating assignment in any year, it was particularly daunting as a follow-up to Beijing’s 2008 Opening Ceremony, a lavish, $100 million spectacle executed with mind-boggling precision by 15,000 performers. There was simply no topping it. So Boyle didn’t try. Instead, he set out to make his show a celebration of the human spirit: scrappy, messy, and bursting with life. It’s a theme that he cultivated throughout his film career, telling stories of ordinary people triumphing against the daunting forces like poverty (Slumdog Millionaire), nature (127 Hours), and a zombie apocalypse (28 Days Later), sometimes while literally covered in excrement (as in scenes from Slumdog and Trainspotting).

The queen departs with James Bond. (Photo: Getty Images)

Thus, while the children in Beijing’s ceremony stood motionless and smiling as they lip-synched to the perfectly pitched voices of less photogenic children, the London children jumped on hospital beds and shrieked at storybook villains. The Chinese chorus was dressed in gold and glowing white; the British ensemble who acted out the Industrial Revolution literally had dirt on their faces. In contrast to Beijing’s synchronized and symmetrical masses, a spirit of individuality reigned in London, with performers of all ages, races, ethnicities, and body types — plus James Bond, Dizzee Rascal, and Mr. Bean, because Boyle’s ceremony wasn’t an ode just to U.K. ideals but also to things that people actually like. And that included Boyle’s preferred medium of film, along with television, popular music, and even (in a segment about London teenagers falling in love) that oft-cited bane-of-modern-communication: texting.

But let’s walk through the highlights, shall we? Boyle opened his show with a two-minute film called Journey Along the Thames, a high-speed jaunt from the source of the river all the way to London’s Olympic stadium, featuring blink-and-you’ll-miss-it homages to Monty Python, Pink Floyd, Frog and Toad, and the 30-year-old BBC soap opera EastEnders. (Watch at 9:35.) Then the stadium set was unveiled, a verdant heath where performers danced around Maypoles and played cricket in tribute to England’s rural past, while children’s choirs were broadcast from all four nations of the U.K. singing patriotic hymns. Kenneth Branagh, dressed in a top hat as engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, scaled the set to recite some Shakespeare and usher in the Industrial Revolution. (17:25) Thousands of volunteers marched into the stadium to drumbeats led by deaf Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie and literally “built” modern-day London, while paying tribute to the movements that formed the U.K.: the industrialists, suffragettes, soldiers, West Indian immigrants, and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band (a fictional organization but an influential one nonetheless). In a dazzling set piece worthy of a Busby Berkeley film, the hammer-wielding, metal-pouring crowd “welded” an Olympic ring that flew into the air to join its companions above the stadium. (30:00)

The Olympic rings rise. (Photo: Getty Images)

Then it was time for the queen to arrive, in what may very well be the best entrance in the history of the throne: Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, “parachuted” into the stadium alongside James Bond. The epic joke was set up by a short film shot at Buckingham Palace, featuring Daniel Craig, the actual freaking queen, and, most impressive of all, her corgis. (34:20)

The “queen” makes a grand entrance. (Photo: Getty Images)

This was followed by the most awesomely left-field sequence of all, a children’s-book-themed ode to the National Health Service. Nearly 2,000 volunteers from the NHS and British hospitals performed a hospital-bed ballet as Harry Potter novelist J.K. Rowling read a passage from Peter Pan, unleashing giant puppets of famous English-authored villains — Cruella De Vil, Voldemort, the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang — to terrorize the hospitalized children and their nurses. (49:45) Just as all hope seemed lost, an army of Mary Poppinses (a word that never before needed to be pluralized) parachuted down from the sky with their umbrellas to save the young charges. Then an orchestra played “Chariots of Fire,” with Rowan Atkinson — in character as England’s hugely popular comedy export Mr. Bean — on keyboard. (56:35)

Voldemort makes an appearance. (Photo: Getty Images)

Two more sequences, and an appearance by football star David Beckham, preceded the annual Parade of Nations. First, the aforementioned texting-driven teen romance, a dance number intercut with songs and film clips from the 1960s to the present, plus a cameo by “inventor of the World Wide Web” Tim Berners-Lee. (1:02) Then there was a memorial dance tribute to “friends and family” of Olympic participants, including the victims of the 2005 London bombings, staged by choreographer Akram Khan, an English dancer of Bangladeshi descent, with a hymn sung by Emeli Sandé, a Scottish singer of Zambian descent (1:25:15). (As a show of the U.K.’s diversity and unity, it’s even more poignant now, post-Brexit.)

The annual Parade of Nations and torch-lighting followed, layered with the requisite pageantry: bikers wearing giant doves’ wings, 7 billion pieces of paper dropped from the ceiling to symbolize the Earth’s population, Paul McCartney singing Paul McCartney songs in his Paul McCartney voice. (3:48:14) Even though the ceremony had Boyle’s personal stamp all over it, viewers left feeling like they’d seen a little of the best of everything, which is, after all, what the Olympics are supposed to be. The director’s Opening Ceremony will go down as a great moment in Olympic history, when the world rooted for England’s Industrial Revolution, the queen parachuted from the sky, and Mary Poppins saved the children of London from He Who Must Not Be Named.