Eiffel Tower Effect / Live-Action Films

• 12 Monkeys makes extensive use of the circa-'90s Philadelphia skyline, particularly the glass towers of Liberty Place.
• At the end of 2010: The Year We Make Contact there's a montage showing the Lincoln Memorial, St. Basil's Cathedral, the Pyramids of Giza, the Eiffel Tower, Tower Bridge and the beach next to Heywood Floyd's house in Hawaii. In every shot, there are two suns in the sky.
• In Roland Emmerich's 2012, it's the end of time! What happens at "the end of time"? Famous landmarks get destroyed! Time, meanwhile, apparently continues to flow.
• 28 Weeks Later concludes with a scene of the "infected" running rampant in Paris. One guess as to how we're shown that it's Paris.
• The Adventures of Picasso combines this with the California Doubling: a different landmark appears over the very same scenery to show which city the characters are in.
• In Aline, when a young Aline Dieu (Valérie Lemercier) goes to Paris for the first time, she poses at the Trocadéro with the Eiffel Tower in the background.
• Argo uses the Azadi Tower in Tehran and the Hollywood sign with the latter shown in decrepit condition (anachronistically so, apparently for symbolic reasons; it had been restored the year before the story takes place).
• Armageddon (1998) had the Eiffel Tower demolished.
• On one of the theatrical posters for Around the World in 80 Days (1956), the Westminster clock tower and the Eiffel Tower are used as shorthand for London and Paris, despite the fact that the movie takes place in 1872 and the Eiffel Tower hadn't been built yet.
• In Austerlitz, the Palace of Westminster, including St Stephen's Tower, is visible out of Pitt's window. Unfortunately, it wasn't built until decades after the time the film is set.
• In The Avengers (1998), Big Ben was completely demolished by the film-makers to demonstrate that the bad guy was really, truly evil.
• The City in Babe: Pig in the City is a massive parody of this. It contains every landmark mentioned on this page, all within view of the same window◊, and its streets are canals (as in Venice, Italy).
• Being There takes place in and around Washington, D.C., but the setting is only gradually revealed to the audience because the film is confined to Chance's townhouse for its opening section. He's never been outside it, and it's in a poorer section of the city, so we don't start seeing landmarks like the Washington Monument, the White House, and the Capitol Building until he's wandered well away from it. Prior to this, the only hint that Chance lived in Washington was an ad for the Washington Post on a television.
• The Brain Stealers has an action scene in Tokyo, set on the Tokyo Tower's midsection (appropriately enough, the Tokyo Tower is based on the Eiffel Tower). The heroine Li Chiu-Lan managed to hurl a mook off the tower's side, before getting pushed off herself and ends up Hanging by the Fingers until her partner saves her.
• Camille Claudel, a biopic about the 19th century sculptor, puts an interesting spin on this. Camille leaves a doctor's office, distressed at having learned that she is pregnant. The camera pans up to show the Eiffel Tower behind her—still under construction, built up only to the second level.
• The 1945 film Captain Kidd features the Tower Bridge in its establishing shot for a scene set in London — even though the bridge wasn't built until nearly two centuries after Kidd died.
• In Casablanca, Rick's Paris flashback begins with a shot of...the Arc de Triomphe.
• Since A Christmas Carol was written before Westminster Palace, Tower Bridge, and the Clock Tower were built, most film adaptations use St. Paul's Cathedral to this effect, and the bells Scrooge hears on Christmas morning would be coming from there.
• In Clegg, the film establishes that Clegg and Cruikshank have travelled to Paris with a shit showing the pair of them with the Arc de Triomphe in the background.
• Colette only uses one or two slightly less well-known Parisian landmarks (though it can’t resist mentioning the in-period debate about the trope namer structure), but the poster designer just had to include the Eiffel Tower.
• In The Dark Knight and before that Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life, the protagonist(s) leap off the Two-ifc in Hong Kong.
• In the film adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada, when Andy finally goes to Paris the Eiffel Tower is clearly visible out of the window in her suite.
• Dhoom 2 wanted to be sure everyone knew the second half of the movie took place in Brazil, so they made a very big deal out of the Christ The Redeemer statue in Río de Janeiro. So much so that a scene in one of the songs took place there.
• In the Bollywood film Don, most of the action occurs in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Every five minutes or so there is an establishing shot of the Petronas Towers so that we don't forget this, even when they come between scenes that occur miles away from the towers.
• La Famille Bélier gives a Parisian example: as soon as the family arrives in Paris, they encounter the Eiffel Tower.
• Un Flic is a downplayed Parisian example: instead of seeing the Eiffel Tower early on, we see the Arc de Triomphe late in the film. It's visible from Simon's hotel room.
• Averted in Frantic where we don't catch a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower until the last part of the movie. In fact the protagonist is momentarily confused to see the Statue of Liberty.
• Parodied in French Kiss, in which the main character Kate says while in Canada that despite hating all things French, she does want to see the Eiffel Tower one time in her life. When in Paris, she keeps missing seeing the Tower because of silly contrivances (a bus blocks it, and so on). It isn't til she's leaving Paris that she sees the Tower, beaming after finally viewing it. It's never seen again in the film. (Played straight and/or lampshaded for the poster, which has the base of the Tower indistinctly in the background behind the leads.)
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra had the bad guys take out the Eiffel Tower specifically for shock value to demonstrate how evil they were.
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Sorcerer’s Stone in the United States) used a brief shot of Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, and the River Thames to establish London before we cut to Harry and Hagrid arriving at the Leaky Cauldron.
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince shows the Millennium Bridge being destroyed by Death Eaters. It also has a scene of Harry flying down the Thames, past Canary Wharf and the London Eye... despite the fact that this scene takes place in August 1996, when the Canary Wharf development (save only 1 Canada Square) and the London Eye hadn't been built yet.
• Home Alone: When everyone is in Rob and Georgette's apartment in Paris, the Eiffel Tower is in the background.
• Home Alone 2: Lost in New York: Kevin realizes that he didn't get on the plane to Miami when he looks out a window at the airport and sees the Manhattan skyline.
• The traditional icon for New York City was the Brooklyn Bridge (called, not unreasonably, the Manhattan Bridge by people in Brooklyn, which was not a part of NYC at the time). After the Twin Towers were completed in 1970 and 1972, they promptly became the new icon. Now that they are gone, the Brooklyn Bridge is back. The Hot Rock, filmed in 1971, for good measure showed both icons.
• In Hudson Hawk, the title character wakes up after being knocked out to find himself in Rome. He knows this because his hotel window just happens to face the Colosseum. Even better, when he then passes a door/window at a 90 degree angle with the first, he can still see the Colosseum.
• Inception is a bit of a Shoot the Money film, so we have Scenery Porn (and Scenery Gorn) in the form of the streets of Paris exploding outwards in a beautiful manner, folding in on themselves like a taco and during the scene where Ariadne plays with the use of mirrors on the street, the Eiffel Tower is visible in the background.
• Various landmarks are shown in Independence Day to indicate where some of the alien ships have parked.
• Indiana Jones series:
  • When Indy leaves San Francisco in Raiders of the Lost Ark, his plane is shown flying over the Golden Gate Bridge. This is sometimes thought to be an anachronism because the film is set in 1936 and the Golden Gate Bridge didn't open until 1937. However, the bridge had been under construction since 1933 and we don't get a clear enough shot of the bridge to tell whether it's finished or not.
  • During the Travel Montage in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the plane is shown flying over the Great Wall of China, but the route shown on the map takes it nowhere near the Great Wall.
  • Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade uses the Petra ruins in Jordan as the entrance to the temple at the end. However, there is nothing apart from solid rock behind the façade in Petra, and the context in which it appears in the film would imply that the actual ruins do not exist in the movie's reality.
• James Bond:
  • The movies in general have used Big Ben far more than necessary for the London scenes.
  • A more egregious example is in Goldfinger where Felix's office has a clear view of the White House, even though the CIA's headquarters are in the suburb of Langley, Virginia.
  • SPECTRE made sure its headquarters in Paris weren't too far from the Eiffel Tower.
  • The Man with the Golden Gun provides a temporary example by depicting the MI6 Hong Kong office in the burnt out and capsized hulk of RMS Queen Elizabeth, the former ocean liner that had been destroyed by arson in Hong Kong harbour the year before the film was released.
  • The most egregious example is definitely The Spy Who Loved Me in which the Egyptian base of operations for MI6 is located just inside the main entrance to the Temple of Ramesses II.
  • In Octopussy, there is a shot of Bond's helicopter flying in front of the Taj Mahal, although Agra is not on the way to his destination (Udaipur, where the film is set and was filmed, is over 600 kilometers South-West from Agra). The director felt that he needed to insert a shot of the Taj Mahal because it was so beautiful, and they were in India anyway.
  • Since the last third of A View to a Kill takes place in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area, it's perhaps inevitable that the film climaxes over the Golden Gate Bridge. And earlier in that film, May Day leaps off the Eiffel Tower itself.
  • When the plot of Skyfall takes Bond to Shanghai, we see the standard establishing shot of the Lujiazui skyline reflecting on the Huangpu at night.
• John Wick: Chapter 4 does this with all three of the cities heavily featured in the film:
  • The opening shot of Paris is none other than the Trope Namer itself, the Eiffel Tower.
  • Ōsaka is introduced with a shot of the Dōtonbori canal.
  • Berlin is introduced with a shot of the Brandenburg Gate.
• Justice League: Wonder Woman's Batman Cold Open shows her foiling a terrorist bombing in London. The Establishing Shot is Tower Bridge hung with a huge black flag with the Superman symbol, showing the worldwide mourning for the loss of their hero. The terrorists are shown driving across the bridge before carrying out their attack.
• Subverted in The Kentucky Fried Movie's in-universe spoof "A Fist full of Yen" which shows the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, then labels the shot "Hong Kong."
• The Killer That Stalked New York, a 1950 film Very Loosely Based on the 1947 New York City smallpox outbreak, uses the Washington Monument, Big Ben, and the Eiffel Tower for the Establishing Shots for Washington, D.C., London, and Paris, respectively.
• Parodied in A Knight's Tale, in which the Establishing Shot of medieval London uses a wooden version of the London Eye as a distinctive landmark.
• As one of the rare non-Asian films set (even partially) in Taipei, Lucy uses Taipei 101 generously in its establishing shots of the city. Later, the film moves to Paris, where during the climactic scene the title character transports herself to just outside the tower, giving us a pretty full view.
• Man in the Attic opens with a shot of Big Ben and the fog shrouded Thames River to establish the movie takes place in London.
• Non-urban example: In Men in Black 3, when Boris escapes from the lunar supermax prison, he steps out into the middle of Tranquility Base, instantly establishing that he's on our Moon rather than any of the other worlds presumably known to that Verse's MIBs.
• The Mosfilm biopic Mikhailo Lomonosov opens with a shot of a snowbound Peter and Paul Fortress to represent both St. Petersburg and Tsar Peter I "the Great" whose death opens the film.
• The Mummy Trilogy:
  • The Mummy: You can see the Pyramids from Thebes.
  • The Mummy Returns established clearly that the opening scene was set in London, by showing the Houses of Parliament, St Paul's Cathedral and Tower Bridge. All apparently next to each other.
• Both National Treasure films did this in every single scene set in a major city. The Lincoln Memorial is the backdrop for a very serious discussion between Ben and Riley early on in the first film, apparently just so that they could get it in there. Fun fact: That scene was filmed on a day when the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was drained for maintenance. They digitally added the water back in, in post production.
• Early on in Ocho apellidos vascos, the Giralda can be seen from Rafa's bedroom in Seville.
• In Out of the Past, any exterior shot of San Francisco stars the Golden Gate Bridge.
• Pacific Rim: When the kaiju attacks Sydney, we see it break through the wall, which was apparently built right next to the Sydney Opera House, despite this requiring the wall to go deep into Botany Bay rather than just following the coast.
• In the original Planet of the Apes (1968), the movie ends with Taylor finding a demolished Statue of Liberty "You animals! You finally gone and done it!"
• Averted to great effect in Jacques Tati's film Playtime. It's set in Paris, but the film is all about the alienation of the jet-set 1960s. The only times monuments like the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe are visible are when they're accidentally reflected in the glass doors of the hyper-modern, anonymous buildings the film's shot in. In a background gag, a travel agency has posters of places like Rome, New York, and Cairo. All of the posters show the same hyper-modern anonymous building.
• The Return of Sherlock Holmes opens (and closes) with a shot of Big Ben to establish that the film is set in London (despite being shot in New York). No other London landmark is ever seen.
• The villain of The Rocketeer (Timothy Dalton) meets his end by crashing into the "HOLLYWOODLAND" sign, resulting in its present lettering.
• The Sentinel (2006) is about a Secret Service agent accused of being a mole, and as such there are lots of establishing shots of the White House and other Washington DC landmarks.
• The Sinking Of Japan, particularly the 2006 remake, does this quite a bit. Flying volcanic rocks smash into ancient Japanese temples and the Tokyo Tower succumbs to the waves.
• The Trans America Pyramid appears in The Social Network which would almost be a Shoutout to Fincher's Zodiac but Fincher says it was random stock footage they picked.
• Shown during the Avengers Assemble montage of The Soldier, despite the fact that Scene Shift Captions are used throughout the movie. The green fields of England and the French Alps somehow require establishing shots of the Palace of Westminister and the Eiffel Tower.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2020):
  • San Francisco is prominently represented by the Transamerica Pyramid, where Sonic's rings fall on top of, and a few background glimpses of the Golden Gate Bridge. One pre-redesign poster shows a first-person view of Sonic on one of the struts of the bridge, although he never actually comes near the bridge in the actual movie.
  • When Sonic and Robotnik warp to Egypt, Robotnik blows up the Great Sphinx and Sonic approaches and climbs atop the Great Pyramid of Giza.
  • They also chase across the Great Wall of China briefly.
  • When they go through France, the tower is visible but they don't actually go near it. In the animated credits sequence, Sonic spirals up the tower before entering the next ring, although it's colored like Tokyo Tower for some reason.
• The 2021 Irish film Spears has scenes set in London, Florence and Berlin - and lets you know it through use of the landmarks. Florence is coded with the Piazza della Signoria, London with The Shard and Berlin with the Tiergarten.
• Various parts of Spice World have the group riding around on their tour bus around numerous landmarks in London, as The Nostalgia Chick notes in her review of said movie, including a death-defying scene toward the end of the movie with Victoria Beckham trying to drive the bus over Tower Bridge, as it rises to allow a boat to pass through, so they could make it to their performance at the Royal Albert Hall. (This may be a reference to a real-life incident from 1952, in which a bus jumped Tower Bridge just after it had started to rise.)
• All sorts of science fiction movies have destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge as an avatar for San Francisco. In reality, crossing the bridge north from the city doesn't really go anywhere other than some ritzy bedroom communities and the sticks further north. Destroying the Bay Bridge, on the other hand, would put a serious wound in the city's infrastructure and many people's commutes, but the Golden Gate is a much prettier and more instantly-recognizable bridge. Averted as a very brief joke in Star Trek (2009), where Spock shoots Nero's drill down when it's drilling into Earth, just above Starfleet Academy in San Francisco. The drill breaks up and part of it falls down...just to the right of the Golden Gate Bridge and into the water. And then it nearly gets destroyed again in the next movie. Alcatraz, however, is not spared.
• The retooled cut of Superman II has terrorists planting a bomb on the Eiffel Tower. Notably, the French police are rather blasé about it exploding.
• Attempted (badly) in Taking Lives. The film is set in Montreal, but has numerous lingering shots of the Chateau Frontenac...which is in Quebec City.
• Parodied (hard) in Team America: World Police. Each set is an elaborate miniature of the most visible landmarks in the city (Paris, Panama, etc.), placing them all in the space of a few blocks...and then destroying them, much to the consternation of the people who live there.
• Averted in Thor: The Dark World — though much of the action takes place in London, we never see Westminister Palace (home of "Big Ben"), Tower Bridge, or Buckingham Palace. The only landmarks on display are the Greenwich naval college building, and the gherkin-shaped 30 St. Mary Axe tower.
• Trainspotting introduces a sequence set in London with a quickfire montage featuring Big Ben, Tower Bridge, Trafalgar Square and Canary Wharf.
• The Transformers Film Series is quite notorious for this by now. In the first film, we had the Hoover Dam, and Starscream partially destroyed one of its water towers. In the second, the Great Pyramids of Giza are directly across from the Rose Red City of Petra (what happened to Israel in-between?). Michael Bay was pretty happy about being allowed to film at both locations.
• Played for laughs in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. The Big Bad makes his threat video using a fake backdrop of the Eiffel Tower and playing French music in the background (he was on a train the whole time). When the government agents are coming up with ways to catch him, one feebly suggests searching Paris.
• Van Helsing begins with an opening shot of Paris. Interestingly, the movie is set in 1888, and the movie shows it as incomplete.
• It's a little hard to make out since it's so far away, but in Who Framed Roger Rabbit the Hollywood Sign is visible from Eddie's office window.
• X-Men Film Series
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past: The iconic landmark is used in the Establishing Shot of Paris.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse: The Giza pyramids are in the background in the wide shot of Cairo. There is also the Sydney Opera House.
• Zodiac uses a number of icons to show San Francisco, the Ferry Building, the Transamerica pyramid is shown frequently, though it's still under construction, Melvin Belli's St. Francis Wood mansion is shown to have a close view of Downtown San Francisco. In reality, the neighborhood is miles from Downtown and the view is obscured by hills.