Olympics Opening Ceremony Review: Paris’ Lengthy Spectacle On The Seine Lost In Translation On The Small Screen
The skies over a soaked Paris remained overcast for Friday’s 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony as the promised trés unique spectacle on the River Seine proved rudderless despite some superstars, a historical mixtape, and a grande balançoire or two.
Despite the theatre on the grandest scale with landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral and the Louvre as the backdrop, the opening ceremony simply wasn’t great TV.
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Even with the rain pouring down, things definitely improved once darkness fell over City of Lights more than two hours into NBC’s live coverage. Night unveiled more of the drama of Paris itself, the river, and the performers who came alive as the barge-propelled parade of nation and their 205 delegations came to an end.
In the end as Celine Dion made her much-hyped and pitch-perfect appearance under the Olympic rings on the sparkling Eiffel Tower and past Gold medalist Teddy Riner and Marie-José Pérec lit the cauldron, it felt like viewers had been forced to run a four-hour marathon.
The hooded horse rider bringing the Olympic flag across the Seine and into the recently constructed Trocadéro Stadium certainly was a true showstopper. Still, ever followed by legends like Serena Williams, Nadia Comăneci, Carl Lewis and Rafael Nadal, that final evocative display on the tower that engineer Gustave Eiffel started in 1887 wouldn’t have been out of place at the conclusion of any stadium rock show of the past 20 years.
However, after so long a wait and more false endings than a season of Lupin, one has to ask: Where are Daft Punk and Cirque du Soleil when you need them?
RELATED: 2024 Paris Summer Olympics TV Schedule: Full Event, Date & Channel Listings
Essentially an overripe tourism ad for the City of Lights, the cliché-addled Opening Ceremony was full of shopping hot spots, fashion show red carpets, some tunes from Les Misérables, an unintentional homage to Frozen 2, and the bells of the partially rebuilt Notre Dame cathedral — materials you’d find in any in-flight magazine on the descent to Charles de Gaulle Airport.
The organizers of Paris’ first Olympics in 100 years may have missed out putting a spotlight on the living legend Catherine Deneuve and the deceased Johnny Hallyday and Serge Gainsbourg. At least in their bread and circus’ approach they had the foresight not to shower the event in baguettes, even if French citizens themselves seemed to be relatively absent in the security lockdown that more resembled a monarch’s coronation than the opening of 16 days of sports competition.
Still, no one can deny the visceral jolt of multiple bloodied and headless Marie Antoinettes in the windows of former prison The Conciergerie, and the pyrotechnic-enhanced power chords of French metalheads Gojira against the iconic river was certainly a site to see.
Ripping through a very 2024 cover of the French Revolutionary tune Ah! Ça Ira with some assistance from opera singer Marina Viotti, Gojira suddenly made the event very current. On that note, future Olympics should pick up what the NFL and NBA have been putting down for decades: heavy metal and sports belong together.
Aya Nakamura suffered vile blowback from racists and thugs earlier this year when she was announced to be a part of the Opening Ceremony. Yet, as is so often the case around the Western world, it was the superstar immigrant who put her nation’s best face and best moves forward with a gold-themed mashup performance of her hits “Pookie” and “Djadja” on a Pont des Arts runway.
In another near heart-stopping move, the grand reveal of gold statues of heroines of French history along the banks of the Seine was a sight for the ages that will change Paris forever. In a plethora of choices to be made for today’s show, the sculpted presence of Olympe de Gouges, Alice Milliat, Gisèle Halimi, Simone de Beauvoir, Paulette Nardal, Jeanne Barret, Louise Michel, Christine de Pizan, Alice Guy and Simone Veil in a city full of male effigies was remarkable.
Yet, in attempting to both medieval and thoroughly modern in its attitude and execution, the ambitious vision of Opening Ceremony artistic director Thomas Jolly was a muddle of overreach, never really finding its narrative heart. Lady Gaga came out way too early with her pre-recorded pink-feather performance of Zizi Jeanmarie’s classic “Mon truc en plumes.”
With Paris as the first Olympics to feature breakdancing, the near absence of French hip hop tonight to honor one of the genre’s four foundational elements was a misstep. Rim’K’s adrenalized short stint and shout-out to Snoop Dogg was great, but also the definition of too little, too late.
An ill-considered extended cameo by Despicable Me’s beloved Minions and a stolen Mona Lisa reeked of a shameless sop to American broadcaster NBC and its sister studio Universal, home of the Illumination-created creatures. Also, emblematic of the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony’s fundamental flaw: the Minions sequence was too damn long — and I love the Minions.
Singing from the same songbook, the blasts of the tricolore on the bridges over the Seine came off as an afterthought that proclaimed if flux and confusion was what the Opening Ceremony wanted to tell us about Paris 2024, it succeeds. Somehow, despite the unsurprising cheerleading of NBC’s main Olympics host Mike Tirico, a refreshingly informal Kelly Clarkson, and Peyton Manning, it’s unlikely that’s what steel-jawed President Emmanuel Macron and Paris Olympics chief Tony Estanguet were aiming for.
Put together against a constant backdrop of political chaos in the Fifth Republic and launching mere hours after a clearly coordinated attack crippled much of France’s rail system, the start of the $10 billion Games of the XXXIII Olympiad took the event outside a stadium for the first time.
In that vein, the multi-segment show began so promisingly with a suited and booted Zinedine Zidane kicking things off. Harking back to London 2012’s opening, the soccer legend was in his best James Bond mode bringing the Olympic flame from an empty Stade de France to the heart of the city in a pre-recorded segment. Spreading the wealth of the world watching, Zizou had a little help from some 2024 street urchins and a parkour-bounding masked figure who seemed straight out of video game Assassin’s Creed.
Well done. Or as Tirico said: “The show gets off to a rousing start.”
Unfortunately, after that, the whole thing ran out of gas – at least on the small screen.
The distribution of hundreds of cameras in drones, helicopters, boats and smartphones offered ample opportunities to the directed show with the whole city as its arena. Sadly, in what could have been the biggest show on Earth, many of those opportunities were missed. Maybe it was the weather or maybe it was the fact organizers were never able to have a full dress rehearsal, but the scale of the long route along the Seine was often diminished in close-ups and disjointed cuts.
Hobbled by the pandemic-delayed Olympics in 2020 and then the near-empty stadiums of the delayed Tokyo Summer Games in 2021, Paris 2024 is really NBCUniversal streaming service Peacock’s coming-out party in many ways. Based on Friday’s Opening Ceremony, which will be repackaged and streamlined for a primetime edition tonight stateside, the Comcast-owned streamer better hope the competitions themselves deliver.
Always selling, as they say, NBC bathed in the stateside stars from the jump with cutaways from the parade of smaller nations to the likes of basketball stars A’ja Wilson and Steph Curry on the Team USA boat. Even though Simone Biles was sitting out today, Hoda Kotb and Snoop Dogg chatted with the gymnast’s family in what was a network time killer by any other name. Then again, with queries like “Is she happy that you guys are here?’ the “Gin and Juice” rapper wasn’t exactly bringing his beloved droll wit to liven up the occasion.
Maybe Snoop was just spent.
No one could argue that by the time International Olympic Committee kingpin Thomas Bach gave his customary remarks and Zidane returned with the Olympic torch, even the VIPs, the remaining athletes (many of whom may have been praying they didn’t get sick from all that time in the rain) and maybe even celebs like Tom Cruise, Queen Latifah, Sarah Jessica Parker, Wicked’s Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo were exhausted.
Leaning forward, there are two lessons for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics out of today’s Opening Ceremony: Go full Hollywood, and less is more. Hopefully the Casey Wasserman-led City of Angels Olympics will remember, unlike Paris 2024, that you always want to leave them wanting more.
Maybe Paris will heed that for the Closing Ceremony on August 11.
Nous ne pouvons que prier.