10 Screenwriting Lessons You Can Learn From Man Of Steel

6. Give Us A Reason To Care About Everyone

man of steel10 There's a portion of Man Of Steel which exists to showcase how General Zod's actions are effecting the little people (i.e. the inhabitants of Earth who don't have super powers). To do this, we get a few sequences with clear 9/11 overtones that have Lois Lane's editor, Perry White, and a couple of other Daily Planet journalists, running through the streets as Metropolis crumbles and explodes around them (and boy does it explode). At this point, though, White and these journalists haven't been developed as anything more than exposition machines, or characters who exist to stare at television screens and look shocked when bad things are happening. Sadly, this means that we don't really care if anything happens to them. And to be totally honest, why should we? We don't know these people, and it's actually kind of awkward to have White running around Metropolis shouting "Jenny! Jenny!" when we don't really even know who the hell Jenny is. All it would have taken for these part to have had their intended impact? Include a few brief scenes where we get to know these characters as people that are actually a big part of Lois Lane's life. Writing your own script, it's easy to overlook secondary characters in this fashion because you're concentrating on driving the story forwards. But had Goyer (or Snyder, perhaps) opted to shave a couple of minutes off of the action sequences and given us the opportunity to get to know some of the secondary players instead, the scene featuring these people fighting for their lives might've been genuinely harrowing, as opposed to feeling like mild filler.
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