How do film writers create emotional sympathy for the characters?

(READ THIS!)(Random Spoilers) If you watch a show like Game of Thrones, and when Ned Stark is decapitated, you feel sad and shocked beyond belief. Or of course the movie Titanic, where I nearly cried at the end when Jack Dawson died. But when you watch a movie such as Transformers you don't give two shits whether or not any of the characters die. Infact I thought it was quite funy when Jazz or Optimus Prime died. How do film writers create this connection to characters?|||A good question but it is the emotion called"empathy" that writers are trying to convey to their audience. Even bad films can accomplish this goal,but all successful films have this quality. Empathy is created when we, as the audience, begin to feel "compassion" for a character and there are all kinds of tricks to invoke this emotion.





For instance, in Lethal Weapon the one guy states "here is a gun, kill yourself". The Mel Gibson character pulls out a bullet, and I'm paraphrasing, "I think about it everyday, got a special bullet right here". This is just an example how a audience can be made to feel compassion which evolves into empathy. The Lethal Weapon is vulnerble to suicide. Why? How is a man who is apparently fearless constantly thinking about taking his own life, hence the compassion we begin to feel. The great writers can do this without you even thinking about it.