The Giver finally gets its adaptation 20 years after it hit bookshelves, and its star, Jeff Bridges, has been trying to get this book adapted for about 18 years. The story takes place in the future, where humanity survives in a emotion-free utopia. We can’t say it is entirely emotion-free, but humans no longer experience such emotions as love and hate, therefore, no wars and no differences. When reaching a certain age, young adults are assigned careers, and our protagonist Jonas, gets assigned a very unique career. He is to receive memories of the world before this one from The Giver himself. With all these memories and the fact he skips out on his daily injections that keep human beings at bay, Jonas grows strong emotions, and sets out on a journey to take down this perfect utopia.
Now I read the book 20 years ago, but of course burning brain cells over the years, I don’t remember certain details. With that though, I enjoyed The Giver. It is truly an interesting story, and one that is not easily brought to the big-screen, That is probably why it took so long to make the jump, and even though I enjoyed it, the pacing is fairly slow and the characters are hard to root for.
Jeff bridges brings in a great performance as The Giver. It’s the Jeff Bridges we love seeing on-screen, and then you have the other powerhouse, Meryl Streep, standing opposite of him, it worked very well. The main young adult characters on the other hand, seemed too robotic, and found myself not really caring for them. It’s takes half the movie establishing the story and nothing really exciting happens until this point, which you then start rooting for the main character Jonas. The little journey he has to take is one of the main elements I remember from the book, and I had sort of deja vu when it started playing out on-screen. I like the way the story ended, because it brought some strong emotions into the characters after being such an emotionless type story.
Overall I enjoyed the movie, even though it took a bit to get engaged into the story. Every scene with Jeff Bridges worked in my opinion, and for what I can remember, it gave a pretty decent adaptation from the book. Check out my video review below to hear me talk about it. Let me know if you The Giver, or read the book.