So lady friend keeps digging through my boxes of old drafts and she happened upon this one opening that used to be the opening I wanted for this project but I decided it was just too much and too confusing and too grandiose. She disagreed and said it would get everyone's attention immediately. Feel free to tell me your thoughts, either way.
I'm posting this video version of the song because the girl's dancing is ridiculous, but also kind of the reaction I was looking for - a song you've never heard of and yet you just kinda like it and you don't know why.
Before the audience meets or even sees any character, the camera would fade from black into this:
So the camera fades into a panoramic view of another galaxy, one unknown.
It's an enormous static shot filled with oddly colored planets, stars, suns, meteors, all of which is animated in a semi-childlike way. It is a gigantic shot where an obviously great distance is between the "front" and “back” of the screen.
The scene is most colorful in the center. But a black speck keeps coming closer and slowly starts swallowing more and more of the screen.
A ship flies into the monolith but comes out the other side, as though it were only passing behind it. As it gets closer, the audience can see that it's spinning. It's reminiscent of the monolith in 2001. It gradually keeps coming closer to the screen.
The vibe is slow, moody, strange.
Halfway through the song, it's close enough that the audience can see it's a coffin. Not animated in a childlike way. The camera still does not move. The space coffin keeps getting closer and closer, spinning gracefully.
Near the end of "Bad News From The Stars," when the track seems to be over, the coffin finally engulfs the screen into blackness aggressively, as though the point of its trip across the void was to absorb the camera / viewer.
The screen goes to black.
The sound of a giant spacecraft is passing over directly overhead. It is loud enough to make the theater seem to shake. While in blackness, the audience hears the last words of the song, but they are intensified and reverberate. There is silence and blackness remains.
The idea was to make the audience wonder what the fuck was going on - as in watching the intro to Eraserhead by David Lynch ... but not alienating them. It's difficult to surprise an audience these days without gimmicks or making them decide to just watch reruns of The Office instead.
The pay off would be at the end of the movie, when the scene basically plays in reverse and leads into the credits.
The drugs have become useless, please finish the saga 
