I can't say Gibson ever floated my boat, I find the entire cyberpunk genre where it rains all the time a bit dull. Horses for courses (though I'd still heartily recommend Michael Marshall Smith's first couple of books in the genre, especially Spares and Only Forward which are far better). But yeah, that's the sort of line that a good teacher would tell you to write and then delete, because it sounds clever but doesn't deliver anything useful. Also, ironically for a novel set in the future, it pitches it back into the past. If you snag on metaphor and simile, it's not done well, it's trying too hard. I did read an interview with him once where he explained the opening, and it's actually quite thoughtful, but I think ultimately it doesn't convey what he had in mind.
All this happened, more or less is perfect because it sets out everything and brings you in, in so few words. Of course, novels were shorter back then, Orwell had to do with it was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Melville got call me Ishmael.
Some other classic starts:
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
Marley was dead, to begin with.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
They don't always have to be short.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
And I always loved this one
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.
Certainly for movies, The Matrix, more so if you went in with no clue as to what it was about.