I indulged this weekend and rented a couple of movies from Redbox. One was a film I wanted to watch before I read the book. The other I watched because I had an idea like it and wanted to see what they did with it.

I am a self-stated ‘book purest’ well that is the name I gave myself anyway. You see as much as I love books and like movies the two do not go together in my book.  Hehe. Pun intended.

I am one of those people who find fault with everything that the movie changes from the book and nine times out of ten the book will always be better.  As a media student, I logically know that when you read a book everyone interprets that book differently and the movie is the director’s interpretation of the book.

But I can’t help but feel betrayal when the book and the movie do not match and the more. The more I love the book the greater the sense of betrayal. The only way I have found of getting around that feeling is to watch the movie first and then read the book.

When I wrote the word betrayal, I thought I was being a bit harsh but then I remembered how often I railed after watching a movie after I read the book. In fact, I find that I can’t enjoy the movie at all because I am so busy comparing it to the book or picking it apart.  What surprises me about the venom that I have is that I am completely blasé about the differences I find when I watch the movie first.

Could it be that when we read the book it becomes our story?

But my thought on that is how can it become our story if we don’t identify with the story. For example, the trilogy Hunger Games, I read it several times before it became a movie. Then when the movie came out, I was sooo angry because of the way they made the human antagonist go after the protagonist from the very beginning of the movie. Also, with the film they replaced the real antagonist (the games themselves) with a human antagonist.  I didn’t identify with the protagonist or antagonist. I didn’t identify with the setting or the plot. So why was I angry? How did the characters in the book grab me so deeply that I felt what I describe as righteous anger?

The Movies were Hidden Figures which I want to talk about as soon as I get the chance to read the book. Based on my reading list, it is at least a couple of months away.   The other one was Passengers.

Nothing that I say is aimed toward the actors in the film. I thought the film was good. The choice of actors was fine and the movie well-acted, directed and packaged.

But as an aspiring writer my first thought is always the storyline much to the consternation of my family who must listen to me going on and on about pacing, plot devices and such. Or to the characterization, which to my belief is the holy grail of any work. With amazing characters, almost any work can be salvaged.

How much belief do we have to suspend as the audience to for these two characters to get together? Part of a good character is honesty to the character that you create and believability that he or she is who they say they are and would react or be in the situations the writer places them in.

My first moment of incredulity started when after less than six months of being awake he was despondent and after a year and some months he is considering and almost commits suicide.

My son said he could see it. He said humans are social creatures and without other people they would go insane.  He even reminded me of the movie cast away and how the protagonist had ‘Wilson.”

I agree to a point. See there were many factors there creating a need for our protagonist to need a companion. He was constantly fighting for his life, his food, his water. He had no skill that could be applied on the island. And the most crucial factor was there was nothing on that island to stimulate him.  He was completely believable, not as needing to create a simple companion but an ally. He needed someone to be at his side for battle.

As for believability of our protagonist in Passengers… We have a man in his early 30’s so not a kid anymore. He has an extremely specific trade which would have made that ship a wonderland. From the systems to the robots. How many mechanics do you know that don’t tinker?

With the size of that ship and all the systems on it he would have stimuli to last years. On top of that he had access to the ships learning/training classes. And we know he has the ability to teach himself, because that is how he woke the female character up, so all the other manuals that he could have spent time learning were there as well.  And now on to the companionship. I am going to go back to our first example of Cast Away and Wilson.

We know he was ball and was what Chuck projected him to be. But Jim (our protag in Passengers) has an android at his disposal, not a projection of himself. Not a living breathing human but a being that reacts to stimuli and intelligent conversation.  And on top of that let’s not talk about the fact that they were in space with all those wonders to see and take in.

So yes, being the only human awake might have gotten to him eventually but for the character that was created probably not for twenty-five to thirty years.

The next thing that had me saying wouldn’t have happened like that was finding the perfect woman first pod he looked in. And then stay obsessed.  Here is the thing when people become obsessive about something … they are obsessive about other things as well.

The character was not written with any other obsessions. He might have found her, and he might have known just by looking at her that she was the one. But again, the writer forgot that when he told Aurora later that you can’t judge them by looking at them.

For this device to be believable he would have needed to start reading multiple profiles and going back to hers. If we assume half the passengers were female, he had over twenty-five hundred possibilities. He would have come back to her eventually… but as humans we never pick the best first time around.

I think the writer did better with the female character (Aurora) but she was a little too underwhelming. They made her ready for adventure. She was supposed to be a creative person. Yes, she would have been terribly upset as she wanted to go back to earth in a year.

But since she was doing it just to be the first writer to travel to a colonial world and come back to the future, she would never have carried on about ‘murder’. The anger would have been about the betrayal of not telling her he woke her up. Not at waking her up.

Another thing about her as a writer, she would have missed hearing what people thought about her work, but she wouldn’t worry about no one reading it. Writers write to share a story that they can’t keep in, not to get readers.  Space and the journey which she stated no one else had done would have been wonderland for her writing as well.

We’re not even going to mention the pacing of this story. They tried too hard to make it both action and character driven. It felt like a mash up of Nell and the end of a Die Hard. Both good stories, but together they’re not compatible.

I don’t want to leave you thinking all I am doing is ragging on the characterization because I am not. This is more of an opening to a dialogue about writing or reading characters and how to bring believable three-dimensional characters to the page.