Rating: PG-13
Run Time: 97min
Genre: Drama, Sci-Fi
Director: Phillip Noyce
Featuring: Brenton Thwaites, Meryl Streep, Jeff Bridges, Taylor Swift and Katie Holmes
After much anticipation, Lois Lowry’s The Giver has finally hit movie theatres in Fort Collins. Haunting its viewers with themes of loss, love and self-discovery, The Giver shatters all boundaries and challenges viewers to rethink their idea of a humane society. The 1993 Newbery Medal novel touched thousands of readers worldwide, and is still a popularly recommended book today. Readers will be highly impressed with the quality of which this book has been translated onto the big screen. Whether you are familiar with the tale or not, all audiences should check out The Giver for a whirlwind of a movie.
The protagonist, Jonas, played by Brenton Thwaites, is an adolescent in what they call the Community. Vast and technologically advanced, no one has left the Community, ever. Citizens refer to the area surrounding the Community as “Elsewhere,” a seemingly fitting name for an area which is completely uncharted by the Community’s inhabitants. Daily injections suck out significant emotions such as anger, frustration, love and fear from the Community’s citizens. These injections cause citizens to live their lives without color and music, creating what Jonas and the Giver call the “Sameness”. Citizens live in a “dwelling”, with their family unit, or a group of people that have been assigned to them as their family. Jonas lives with his father, a nurturer in the hospitals for newborns and his mother (played by Katie Holmes), who is a member of justice in their legal system. His sister, Lily, inquisitive and imaginative, is the demonstration to the audience of the effect the Community has had on children’s upbringing in this futuristic setting. The movie starts with Jonas’s graduation where he will be assigned a job that he will have for the rest of his life. However we find out quickly that Jonas is different from his companions because he has the capability to see “beyond”. This ability and several other personal traits is what causes him to be assigned to his job as the Receiver of Memory, and take training from the old reciever, which the audience begins to know as the elusive and mysterious Giver, played by the one and only, Jeff Bridges.
The Receiver of Memory has the most crucial job to the Elders of the Community. Jonas’s job is to receive the memories of the Earth and people’s lives from back and back and back from the Giver. None of the Elders have any of the memories that the Giver or Jonas have, and so the Giver is called in for help whenever the Elders have a situation that they do not know how to deal with. This puts Jonas in a position where he starts to uncover all the secrets that the Elders have been withholding from the Community, and some secrets are more severe than others. What he learns from these memories will change himself and the citizens of the Community forever.
Jonas’s job turns out to be quite the problem throughout the movie. Having been sworn into the secrecy of his job, Jonas is prohibited from sharing information about his new profession with his friends Asher, (Cameron Monaghan) and Fiona, (Odeya Rush). This inability to share this information causes a rift between his friends and his family, which is a major plot strand that Jonas’s juggles with throughout the film.
From a technical standpoint, the movie excellently portrays details such as the no color concept magnificently. For much of the movie, the audience watches the story unfold in black and white. Only through Jonas’s eyes and his experiences with the Giver allows the audience to see the Community in color. This particular adaptation allows viewers to feel like they are actually in the movie, joining in on the adventure.
The Giver touches on themes of communism, and going back to the “Sameness” point, citizens are forced under societal norms that are restrictive and really zap the emotions out of their daily life. From a high schooler’s perspective, a lot of the points The Giver addresses really make you think about how thankful you should be for having the ability to make your own choices. At Fossil Ridge, we are given the opportunity to get involved in numerous clubs and activities, but people like Jonas never even get the chance to consider whether they would want to get involved in things like that because it has never been an available option.
If you are a reader of the book and, like me, tend to be a bit obsessive when it comes to perfecting all details that are portrayed in the book, and are angered by movies that fail to perfect these details, (ahem hem, Percy Jackson and the Olympians) then you may be slightly weary of this movie. However, the changes that were made in the movie aren’t glaringly obvious and they really do seem to make the movie better. One of the slight deviations the movie features from the book would be Jonas’ relationship with Fiona. Where in the book there is a slight touch on the potential romance and the feelings that Jonas harbors for Fiona, the film takes the feeble mention of romance in the book and turns it into a major plot strand in the movie, starting from their journey to their graduation, to Jonas’s escape from the community and their midnight smooch. Asher’s job in the book was the director of recreation, however, the movie changes his job to being one of the fliers of the drones. This detail causes a rather large change in the progression towards the end of the movie because the chief elder utilizes Asher’s job as a drone flyer to track down Jonas while he is in the beyond. So while there are things that readers of the book will be surprised by, the modifications that have been made to the film are positive and without them would have severely slowed down the movie experience.
Now if you’ve seen the trailer, you were probably given the impression that the movie is action-packed, with explosions everywhere, seemingly synonymous to movies like Divergent or The Hunger Games, not the story that all the readers would know. Thankfully, while the film does have some crazy action flying scenes, it doesn’t take away from the authenticity of the plot. Alot of the action that was added to the movie, while it is painful to say since it caused some of the deviation from the book, was well done. Without the action that they added, the movie would have finished and most likely caused viewers to be bored with the gradual close that the book ties up with.
All in all, I was thoroughly impressed by The Giver, I really didn’t think it was going to be all that good, but was pleasantly surprised at all the work Walden Media put into making this movie. My advice? When you get a chance, check out The Giver!
Interested in seeing more about the Giver? Check out these links down below!
