Those landscapes and the tracking are just awesome.
The scale is so gigantic and the timelessness of the landscape sets up the epic horror that reaches back in time.
Font (and colour) is really odd tho but have grown to love it.

does anyone know what font that is?

We're pretty sure it's Helvetica. Kubrick was quite fond of it, along with Univers. His favorite typeface was Futura apparently, with Futura Extra Bold being used for "Eyes Wide Shut" and "2001."*

*From Citizen Kubrick.

The only thing is they should have actually filmed the sequence in Colorado and not Montana for the better scenic and atmospheric affect, at least in my opinion.

It's the mood of a grand awakening, a morning in the vast vista of landscape sweeping by, and the titles are like luminescent blue spirits rising upwards into the sky suggesting that the strong landscape itself releases the supernatural. This film was great in that it presents horror within a framework of daylight, brightly lit sets, natural pastoral settings, and daydream dazes. Two of the pieces "horror" music used in the film (Penderecki) were even titled: De Natura Sonoris 1 and De Natura Sonoris 2 and also "The Awakening of Jakob". The font is almost scientific in it's simple clarity, and fits Kubrick's style of movie. He always has this clinical study of situations and settings, as if a very formal "alien" intelligence is observing with no emotion to color the view.

This title sequence also fits with the ingredient of the Native American burial ground dialogue, hinting again at the Indian theme of supposed forces of supernatural completely tied in with the natural.

Is this also the first time the titles ran upwards instead of down? I always thought the colour of the font was a sly reference to another movie about ESP and kids - Don't Look Now, love that title sequence too.

This is the full-frame composition from the DVD...in the theater the helicopter's shadow (and blades at the top of the final shot) would have been matted out for the wider theatrical aspect.

Great sequence.

speaking of fly-over title-sequence, check out (soon on this site? ) the one for Alexandre Ajax's MIRRORS. Pretty good way of use !

It might be interesting to know that these shots were lengthy, and therefore outakes could then later be used by Ridley Scott in the "Blade Runner" ending sequence.

He's definitely into symmetry and central composition. It's evident in all these screenshots.

Kubrick was famous for being a perfectionist. I wonder why he left the shot where we can see on the ground the shadow of the helicopter filming the car.

Gorgeous wide-angle photography, creepy music, really boring font, and that color certainly doesn't fit the mood either. I wonder what Kubrick was thinking with that? You know he had a reason.

Is this one of the first location helicopter fly-over title sequences? Because now when I see them, I know the filmmakers were being lazy. If I see one more fly-over NYC to open a film, it'll be too soon.