London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony: Isles of Wonder (2012) on Netflix
NR20124hDocumentary
In London's Olympic Stadium, thousands of volunteers stage Isles of Wonder, a ceremony of British history and music. It opens the 2012 Summer Games for athletes from more than 200 nations.
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- IMDb8.3/103,455 votes
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Plot summary
The Olympic Stadium holds a rural Britain of real turf, a water wheel, a model of Glastonbury Tor and farm animals, with villagers playing cricket and football. Carriages bring Victorian industrialists and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who stands on the Tor and speaks Caliban's words. Then the grass is rolled away for Pandemonium: hundreds of drummers beat inverted buckets and bins, smoking chimney stacks rise, and workers mime weaving as the scene turns to the Industrial Revolution. A minute's silence marks the dead of two world wars. Volunteers parade the woman's suffrage movement, the Jarrow Crusade and the Caribbean passengers of the Empire Windrush, and five glowing rings converge above the stadium as the Olympic symbol.
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony: Isles of Wonder (2012)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- In July 2013 it was revealed that on the morning of the ceremony, Britain's surveillance headquarters GCHQ detected a credible cyber attack threat that could have killed the stadium's lighting system; counter-measures were taken and contingency plans discussed with government ministers, but the attack never materialised.
- In 2016, Danny Boyle said Jeremy Hunt, then Olympics and Culture Secretary, pressured him to cut the NHS section; Boyle saved it by threatening to resign and take the volunteers with him.
- Danny Boyle first suggested the Queen be played by a lookalike or a world-class actress such as Helen Mirren, but after Sebastian Coe asked Princess Anne, the Queen agreed to play herself and wanted a speaking part.
- Three weeks before the ceremony, Mark Rylance pulled out of a leading part after a family bereavement and was replaced by Kenneth Branagh.
- Once the athletes were inside the stadium, seven billion small pieces of paper were dropped from a Westland helicopter, each piece representing one person on Earth.
- The Olympic Bell, cast in brass by Royal Eijsbouts under the Whitechapel Bell Foundry's direction, weighed 23 tonnes and was the world's largest harmonically tuned bell; it was inscribed with a line from Caliban's speech in The Tempest.
- Danny Boyle flew to Barbados for an hour-long meeting with Mike Oldfield; Elvis Costello and David Bowie were among those who turned him down, and performing artists were paid a nominal £1 fee to make their contracts legally binding.
- NBC faced criticism for cutting to a Ryan Seacrest interview with Michael Phelps during the memorial wall tribute to victims of the 7/7 London bombings; an NBC spokesman said the segment was left out because programming was tailored for the US audience.
