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Anglo-Saxon (or at least Anglo-Norman) for In Medias Res.
Most stories take a while to build up, as they first introduce you to the characters, the world, and the theme, giving them time to develop in your mind before things start to change and become exciting.
Of course, this means that beginnings are often boring. It's been said that if you miss the first 15 minutes of a movie, you're not missing anything, as the plot doesn't pick up until later anyway. Many writers are aware of this, and their way of dealing with it is sometimes to do an Action Prologue.
An Action Prologue starts off with something exciting happening immediately. Right at the beginning, the hero is sneaking around an enemy base, being menaced by a threat, or something similarly exciting. In some cases this is foreshadowing. The event may be a minor one, but related to a major plot point that we don't discover until much later. It could be a dream sequence, where the hero sees something threatening that later shows up for real. Or it could be something completely unrelated to the main plot at all, used only to make sure that something exciting happens right at the start.
In any case, the action quickly falls right after the Action Prologue, and then those usual first 15 minutes used to flesh out the story and introduce the characters show up.
Compare Batman Cold Open, which illustrates a character's skills at the beginning of a story.
Examples:
Anime & Manga
- Witch Hunter Robin starts off with a mission by the ultra-tech team of super-powered witch-hunters, and the rest of the first episode is introducing their little circle to the audience. And the title character isn't even fully introduced until the second episode!
- The prologue of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has a battle in space the likes of which don't happen until the final of the four arcs - and, in fact, the exact battle shown never actually happens.
- Both the manga and the anime of Chrono Crusade open on Chrono and Rosette being called in to fight a demon and uses it to show some of their personality. It's not until the second episode/chapter that it starts to reveal some of the significance of things mentioned (Chrono being possessive of Rosette, Sister Kate not liking him, etc).
- The anime of DN Angel opens on a fight between Dark and Krad that apparently happened in the past, before cutting to the high school shojo romance opening of the manga.
- Venus Versus Virus's anime version has this. Guns, check. Shooting stuff with said gun? Check. Eyepatch wearing Gothic lolita girl wielding the gun? Check. Creepy girl with red eyes? Check. Then we cut to the earworm of an opening. In the manga however, the intro is mello, and shows how Sumire became the way she is.
- Berserk is a extreme example: it starts with a two volumes of story to establish the setting and then has a twelve volume flashback before reaching the point of time when it started. The anime follows suit with its first episode, which is given no explanation as to how it happened, given that the anime ended at a point where the story could have only gotten there based on action taken by characters that were never introduced in the anime.
- Not exactly action, but Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni's anime adaptation opens with watching a half-obscured silhouette beating someone to death with a blunt instrument... And then the OP starts playing...
- Which is based on how the game begins with a narration going along with a the sound of something hitting something else.
- The first episode of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood mostly exists just to let everyone know "The story is different from the first anime, but everyone's still here!"
Film
- Bolt does this with the Show Within A Show's filming.
- Pretty much universal in James Bond movies.
- All six Star Wars movies start off in a fight of some sort, usually a space battle.
- All of the Indiana Jones films.
- Though the one in the fourth was connected to the main plot.
- The Star Trek films tend to do this. It was especially notable in the first one, where the prologue turns out to be the most action-oriented part of the whole movie.
- Hancock opens up with a gun battle on the L.A. Freeway, with the titular hero arriving to "save" the day.
- Predator 2 starts off with a 'Predator-eye' view of a pitched gun battle between the LAPD and a street gang. This battle is interrupted when the Predator kills and 'cleans' the surviving gangsters.
- The Film Of The Book of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe starts in WWII London, where German fighter pilots are conducting an air raid.
- Prince Caspian similarly starts with Caspian escaping Miraz's assassination attempt, followed by the book's original opening of the Pevensie siblings at the train station.
- The Film Of The Book of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince opens with Voldemort's Death Eaters kidnapping the wandmaker Ollivander and destroying the Millennium Bridge in London.
- The 1986 IMAX film The Dream Is Alive looks like a subversion at first- it opens with about a minute of an alligator and some birds going about their business in a Florida swamp- THEN we hear sonic booms as the space shuttle flies overhead and it cuts to a dramatic touchdown, true to form.
- Diary Of The Dead begins with internet footage of a zombie attack on some TV journalists, then cuts to the protagonists making a horror movie and slowly finding out about the Zombie Apocalypse. Justified as the whole movie is meant to have been edited by one of the protagonists after the event anyway.
- Gamer gets into the action prologue so thoroughly and immediately that one might find it more perplexing than exciting. (Then again, most of us, myself included, didn't find the action exciting anyway.)
- Saving Private Ryan. Good gods. The extended opening sequence makes two firm statements: "This is as close as we can get to D-Day and maintain our rating," and "Please remove your children."
Literature
- The Grey Griffins book series does this at least in the first two books (I haven't read the third yet). The very first chapter is of something scary happening and threatening the lead hero, Max, and his brush with death. It is then, in both cases, revealed to be a dream in the immediately following chapter.
- All of the Hawk And Fisher books start with an action totally unrelated to the story most of the book is dealing with.
- Nearly all of the Halo novels have this.
- Ironically, Starship Troopers - an influential work of science-fiction considered responsible for popularizing Death From Above, Powered Armor, Space Marine, and many other tropes the Halo games and novels are entirely built on - starts with a textbook Action Prologue, going so far as to casually mention (later in the book) that the very enemies they were fighting in said prologue were now allied with the human race against the Bugs, and thus making the entire opening engagement practically superfluous.
- Harry Harrison's two series The Stainless Steel Rat and Bill The Galactic Hero often start each novel this way.
Live Action TV
- Many of the "opening gambits" on Mac Gyver.
- Subverted in the first episode of Young Blades, which opens in the middle of an intense swordfight, then quickly derails into an argument about who gets to play d'Artagnan, revealing that this is merely a game between siblings. (Then the real action begins.)
Videogames
- Video game example: Silent Hill 3 starts with Heather in a spooky amusement park, armed with very little in the way of weapons, and wondering where she is. If you either die or reach the end (which results in her dying in a cutscene), she wakes up and realizes it's just a dream. Much later in the game, you go to that very same amusement park for real.
- Some of the James Bond games. Everything or Nothing actually started you right in the first level, without giving you a menu or anything like it before.
- The God Of War series typically starts out by, as Yahtzee put it, "throwing you into the middle of a pitched battle just in case you thought you might be playing something with a modicum of restraint."
- Final Fantasy VII starts you off in the middle of a raid to blow up one of the evil corporation's Mako reactors.
- The prologue of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night starts at ending of the previous game, Rondo of Blood: the player isn't even controlling Alucard at that point, but Richter Belmont.
- Breath Of Fire 3 opens with the hero escaping from a mine in dragon form. The dragon's stats are such that you cannot lose the battles in this sequence.
- An example of Action Prologue involving the main villain and not the hero: Sarevok beating the crap out of an anonymous warrior and then throwing him from the top of a tower in Baldurs Gate.
- The game Prototype begins with New York in ruin and chaos as well as giving your character full ablities, then after the title appears, flashes back to "18 days ago".
- Almost the same thing happens in Spider-Man: Web of Shadows.
Webcomics
- The Sluggy Freelance story arc "Phoenix Rising" (well, the Oasis half of it, anyway) begins right away with Oasis fighting a group of convenience store robbers. Things then quiet down for a while, giving us time to know the characters, before the action starts up again when Nash Straw kills Lupae.
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