The Giver movie starts out with a teenager named Jonas. Jonas lives in a dystopian society called the Community. In the Community, you get your “assignment”, or job, when you turn 18. Jonas gets the mysterious assignment of Receiver of Memory, which is a rare assignment that you have to be specifically chosen for. With Jonas being the Receiver of Memory, he learns of what was before the Community, and what the Community has taken away from the citizens without them knowing.
My overall rating of the movie is that it was okay, but it could have been better. I’ve read the book version of the Giver, and I really liked it because it was one of the first dystopian style novels written. There isn’t the distinct “love triangle” that’s in so many books and movies for teens written more recently. The book instead focused more on how wrong the way the Community was run. The movie made Jonas fall in love with his best friend, Fiona, where in the book Fiona only had a minor part in the beginning. The writers of the movie turned it into another futuristic love story, and the main thing that I really liked about the book was the exact opposite. I liked the book because it wasn’t another classic love story, it was a different story about the fundamentals of society.
However, they did manage to keep many factors about the Community true. I liked how they kept the citizens clueless and unknowing. It helps to show how much society relies on the government. The citizens are kept in the dark by the Community, but this way they’re safe. The Elders, who are the leaders of the Community, think that being in the dark and being completely safe is better than being in the light and having a chance of danger.
Overall, I liked the Giver. It was different than the normal dystopian movie because it looks more on the way the government runs than on the love triangle aspect. It kept enough aspects of it different so it wasn’t very similar to The Hunger Games or Divergent. It was a good movie that helped to show the limits of society.
