Jimmy Pierce
Well-known member
Like many I grew up reading this book in junior high. In fact, I read it only four years after it was published. I've been watching it's development, which has been going on for about 7 years in it's current incarnation, and it's finally been made. Unfortunately several similar more recent novels have been published and adapted such as The Hunger Games & Divergent. But (in my interpretation, at least), The Giver is not like these novels. It is not about a teenager questioning & confronting a corrupt system in a dystopian society, even if those themes are present, they are not emphasized. It's about an 11 year old boy becoming a 12 year old boy and losing his innocence and observing the change in his new found maturity. It is only towards the end that he questions his society. At the very beginning of the novel, Jonas, the main antagonist, narrates how the society is assigning each young member a position in their community that they will remain for the rest of their life.
I always imagined that the film could get away with a PG13 rating and be a fairly serious movie that could be separated from the typical teen novel adaption. The book itself is bred for a film adaption if you read it carefully and theoretically you could adapt it word for word, scene for scene without changing a thing. It's quite an ingenious teen novel and rather intelligent in it's context. In describing the civilization, it leans itself towards a simple village with little suggestions of advanced technology apart from certain areas of the village, and the Giver himself seems like someone who has had all the life sucked out of him by being the keeper of memories of mankind's past.
When I saw the Hunger Games, I saw a lot of what the Giver would look like in the way some of the districts were depicted. Rural, spare, mankind reverting back to a simpler time. Even "The Village" depicts what I had always envisioned while reading the novel.
Anyway, I'll probably still see it for comparison. One could argue that you can separate the book from the film but the book as it is would be a pretty darn amazing film.