Exposition is always a difficult problem in storytelling. How do you quickly convey crucial background information without boring your audience? "Surely you know, professor Horneman, that one can't just have people tell each other things they already know!"

Well, here you can see the first 4 minutes of The Kingdom, a new movie about the FBI and Saudi Arabia. The credits sequence is a great info visualization that explains the history of the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. from the 1930s until now. They manage to make it pretty exciting - I am imagining a lecture using this kind of stuff...

Anyway, while not revolutionary, it is a clever idea well executed, and it's not very common to see so much information of this kind in a Hollywood movie, especially at the beginning.

(Via Making Light.)