Celine Dion saves a wet 'n wild Paris Olympics opening ceremony: Review

Well, that was certainly very French!

The 2024 Paris Summer Olympic Games officially opened Friday night (local time) in the City of Lights with a very wet but very glitzy opening ceremony (a replay airs on NBC and streams on Peacock at 7:30 EDT/PDT). There were feathers! There was heavy metal! There was a fashion show in the pouring rain! There was Lady Gaga! There was Celine Dion!

It was the giant miasma of home-country culture, modern dance, symbolism and tedium viewers have come to expect from the modern era of opening ceremonies. It was spectacular, but also expected. And it was only partially marred by a lackluster NBC broadcast that for some reason gave the vast majority of commentating duties to the uninformed and underwhelming team of sportscaster Mike Tirico, singer/talk-show host Kelly Clarkson and former football player Peyton Manning.

There was nothing so very outrageous during the four-hour-long ceremony, but nothing so very special, either. Is it possible for something as grandiose as an Olympics opening ceremony to be ho-hum? Well, it appears so. Even with metallic horse puppets and a French flag made out of colored smoke.

The French producers of the ceremony certainly made an effort to bring something new to the table, staging the elaborate to-do across Paris along the Seine River instead of a static show in a large stadium that's become de rigeur. In this Parade of Nations, athletes from each country didn't enter bearing their flags and waving to the cameras; they rode in 85 boats, large and small, a fun little ferry festival that brought more visual interest than very strong-looking people walking along the ground.

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The ceremony also messed with the usual order of things, starting the parade early in the festivities and interspersing it with performances and other entertainments, from the aforementioned Gaga number (a bit rote and lackluster compared to everything that came after her), to French superstars like singer Aya Nakamura belting with a marching band. It all led to the big raising of the flags and official opening of the games on a makeshift stage that looked like the Eiffel Tower, in front of the Eiffel Tower. Logistically complicated? You betcha. Cool looking? Yeah, fine, I'll give it to them.

More:Céline Dion dazzles during Eiffel Tower performance at 2024 Olympics opening ceremony

The entertainment interludes were fun. But they were vastly better when they leaned into French culture in weird and wonderful ways, and terrible when they were part of a corporate synergy fest, as when the Minions from the "Despicable Me" franchise showed up. The highlight of the ceremony was a performance by French metal band Gojira atop a Parisian building with dozens of beheaded Marie Antoinettes below them and fire streaming out front. It was followed immediately by a performance from the French opera "Carmen," a juxtaposition that was simultaneously baffling and absolutely mesmerizing. A close runner-up was the romantic and powerful performance from Dion on the Eiffel Tower to close it all out, especially as the singer has been battling a rare neurological disorder. The emotion in every syllable Dion sang was palpable, as much a rousing call to action for the athletes as it was a personal victory for the singer, who rarely performs.

The ceremony was the usual all-out assault on our senses, interrupted by NBC's broadcasting choices in many of the worst possible ways.

The trio of Manning, Tirico and Clarkson couldn't say anything interesting, so they probably shouldn't have said anything at all. It's one thing to provide inane banter, but another to offer nothing remotely relevant or helpful to viewers, like identifying French singers or statistics about athletes and competitions. Manning would rather try to relate everything to his own football career, or Clarkson to her daytime talk show. And offering such pithy remarks as "the symphony of sounds is breathtaking." Well, that's one thing viewers at home can figure out on their own, Kelly!

Olympics openings are all about the big, bold and bombastic. They don't really have to make sense (and rarely do). They are a competition as much as the rest of the games, a chance for the home country to show off that they're just that much better than the rest of the world. That much more cultured. That much more historically important.

The French went for the gold and maybe they got it, if you are impressed by people dressed as croissants and fashion shows performed in torrential rain. They took the light show of the Eiffel Tower to the extreme, and took the Olympic torch on a reverse commute down the Seine for the lighting of the cauldron.

It was gorgeous! It was bright! It was normal. It was fine. The Games have begun.