9. Prologue Means Prologue
It's a well-known screenwriting trope that you should try to set up your story and introduce your protagonist as soon as possible - lots of screenwriting gurus will tell you that it's best to do that within the first 10 pages, too, because that's the point at which most people decide whether or not they like the movie that they're watching (adhering to the fact that 10 pages roughly translates as 10 minutes of screentime). So although the prologue in
Man Of Steel is a necessary part of the Superman story, it's still a prologue, and in this case, it's far too long. The strangest thing about the first 20 minutes of the
Man Of Steel, which you'll know takes place on a Krypton that kind of resembles the Mars of
John Carter, is that it seems to double-back on itself, giving us information that we've already attained. The simple fact is, the destruction of Krypton could have been 5-10 minutes shorter and none of its impact would have been lessened. By the time Jol-El has reached the Codex, we're already waiting for the story to kick into gear, unaware that there's still lots more to go. Put plainly, it feels stretched. Though many viewers might argue that this part of the story needed to be rendered in as much detail as it was, it actually makes the rest of the movie look thin in comparison: there appears to be more plot and conflict going on in the prologue of
Man Of Steel than anywhere else in the movie, which is reduced to a barebones narrative that can be genuinely summed up as "General Zod wants to get a valuable object back." My point here is: if you're setting up the stakes for your story in a prologue sequence that is somewhat separate from the rest of your story, do it as efficiently as possible. Audiences secretly rue to get past the prologue sections in movies to the place where the "real" story begins. If you write a 20 page prologue, test yourself and see if you can give us same information in 15 pages, or even 10. The quicker you get us into the main bulk of the action, with your protagonist central to the events, the more likely it is that audiences will feel invested in the plot.