Review: The Giver Movie
EntertainmentReviews September 29, 2014 Admin
BY LINDSEY HANNAH
This fall is the bookish teenager’s dream with a plethora of young adult novels being adapted for the big screen. The first film to kick off the long list is The Giver, directed by Phillip Noyce. It features an all-star cast, which includes Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Alexander Skarsgard, Katie Holmes, and Taylor Swift. They did, however, bring in the relatively new face of Brenton Thwaits to play the lead character.
Jonas (Thwaits) lives in a Utopian society where everyone is equal and there is no pain, strife, or choice. When he is selected to be the Receiver of all memories of a time before, he is flooded with images and knowledge of the past from the previous Receiver, now known as the Giver (Bridges). He learns terrible truths about his seemingly perfect world and decides he will stop at nothing to return his world to the way it once was.
Released on August 15th, the movie earned $23.8 million its opening weekend. Though it earned generally positive reactions from the general audience, its critic reviews were not as approving. Many of the arguments behind its low scoring are that the movie fell short of the classic novel by Lois Lowry. Since its publishing it 1993, the book has been featured on required reading for schools all over the country, a rarity for a young adult dystopian novel. It is a childhood favorite of many and features a strong message of the freedom of choice and the many good and bad aspects of what it means to be human.
Despite the popular opinion of many critics, I believe that the movie did a fairly good job of capturing the essence of the bestseller. For instance, in the book, the citizens of the Community take injections in order to only see in shades of grey, eliminating the uniqueness that comes with color. They get this point across in the movie by filming in black and white whenever the characters were seeing in black and white, and filming in color when they weren’t. I thought this was a clever technique to communicate the constraints the government put on the people.
Some may argue that the movie was anticlimactic and somewhat boring. Here, I must disagree again. The Giver is not like the dystopian books showing up everywhere today; it was not violent or action-packed by any stretch of the imagination. It is a more intellectual book and every scene contributes to the plot. The movie stayed very true to this and did not throw in unnecessary brawls or suspense that are not present in the book.
Finally, people have wished for more development of the relationship between Jonas and Fiona (Odeya Rush). The book is a young adult book, almost a children’s book. The love of the two characters was always meant to be innocent and chaste. It plays a minor role in the plot and I’m glad they did not make it a romance film by blowing that aspect out of proportion.
The Giver was a phenomenal movie. Though the film adaptations never really compare to the books they are based on, especially one of these epic proportions, this movie did a better job than I anticipated it would. It stayed true to the book and featured an amazing cast that portrayed their characters with emotion and conviction. I would rate it 8/10 and recommend it to any die-hard dystopian fan – many of whom trace their roots in dystopia back to this novel.
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