The Giver
For every Hunger Games, there are at least four or five of The Giver, movies based on novels about young people living in dystopian futures and trying to resist rigid systems of oppressive government control. It’s becoming a trend, and as we all know, the people in charge of film development in Hollywood believe totally in the idea that if it worked once, it will work a dozen more times.
The Giver is based on an award-winning, renowned novel published over 20 years ago, and it doesn’t fit so easily into the paradigm, but don’t think that Hollywood wouldn’t still try.
And boy did they try. Worse still, they got Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep to help them try. They increased the age of the kids, wrote in a love story, re-established Streep’s town elder character into a Machiavellian arch-villain and wrote in a ludicrously over-the-top Fugitive-style climax. What is taken from the book, the harmoniousness created in the community through the elimination of emotion, colour and creed, comes across on screen as robotic at best, but really it seems as if all the actors involved are second graders performing a Sunday School play.
One gets the impression that the original Giver, in book form, was meant to be more 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Hunger Games’ more Star Wars approach to kids saving the terrible future arc. It was supposed to make us think about the cost of utopia, what we lose by cutting off all the good things that make us human just to get rid of all the bad, and what it would be like to feel as if you’re the one sane person in an insane society. Instead, we get Katie Holmes shrilly tells us to be precise in our language, Meryl Streep watching us with crazy eyes, and Jeff Bridges constantly telling us to get ready for pain.
At least they got that part right.