Paris 2024 made a big deal of being the first Olympics to not use a stadium for the opening ceremony. Instead, the city would be the stage, the ceremony opened up to the masses via a procession down the Seine. If they pulled it off, it would be a logistical and creative marvel.
They didn’t.
Paris’s opening ceremony was instead the worst in recent memory, an interminably boring display which undermined itself at every turn. One would never have known it was directed by a theatre director: the concepts of pacing and narrative structure were completely absent, with the show feeling more like a tacky variety TV extravaganza than anything theatrical.
The biggest mistake revealed itself early. Typically, the athletes’ parade is saved for a lull in the middle: long and repetitive, it’s the moment for audiences to take a break. Paris, for some reason, decided instead to interweave it with the main show. That choice robbed the event of all momentum: just as it was about to gain some steam, everything ground to a halt as we cut to a slow procession of ugly barges.
No one appears to have considered the scale of the parade either — or how long it would take to get from point A to point B. That led to some farcical scenes: while watching the torch bearer zoom down the Seine on a mechanical horse was at first thrilling, by the time the background music looped for a second time it was instead excruciating. Twenty minutes later, while watching a now-real horse slowly shuffle down the Trocadero, one started looking up recipes for tartare de cheval.
The sloppiness and lack of planning was visible throughout. The woefully out of sync cancan dancers seemed to have never rehearsed. The barges, instead of being wrapped in Paris 2024 branding, were kept bare and drab. The TV direction cut from one bad angle to another, often choosing to abandon a genuinely interesting spectacle to instead show us a boring pre-recorded video. The sound mixing was awful. And it was obvious that no preparation had been made for the possibility of rain — which made everything all the worse.
To be sure, there were some beautiful moments. The water-splashing dancers outside Notre Dame were very talented. The blood soaked and heavy metal soundtracked recreation of revolution was thrilling. Celine Dion and Aya Nakamura were excellent. And the hot air balloon cauldron was unforgettable. But these moments were brief and fleeting, struggling to make their mark amid the slowness of everything else.
There was a good show lurking in this four hour behemoth. If only the organisers had found it.
Essayant 