Personally I don’t like the pace or the music of this piece, but it still works very well.

Soylent Green’s beginning is a rare example of how a title sequence can be a self-contained narrative piece, not only giving the context to the main story, but also creating a very distinct diegetic mood. So, it is actually a prologue, not the beginning of the main film (in narrative terms). I use this sequence in my theory classes to explain the concept of Russian montage, and how it can be used to graphically tell a (hi)story (see how the pace, shot size, editing and colour changes). Most films that have prologues (especially dystopian films) use text (see Twelve Monkeys) or voice (see Dune). Here, the lack of text and the significant editing make the viewer not only understand intellectually, but also feel emotionally the space and time of the film. The omission of text and voice is also a clever device to distract attention from the meta-narrator (filmmaker) and attach the audience to the characters of the film, thus creating a personal POV, rather than having an authorial POV.

Moon is another film that succeeds in doing this (by using a corporate video format) attaching the audience to the POV of the corporation (which the main character literally belongs to), until the POV shifts to the individual.

In a way Seven is doing a similar thing (pre-narrative, motivation, mood), but it is more gimmicky.