The Giver (2014)
Directed by Phillip Noyce
In a seemingly perfect community, without war, pain, suffering, differences or choice, a young boy is chosen to learn from an elderly man about the true pain and pleasure of the "real" world.
22 connections found
View:
22 films that influenced The Giver
What critics say influenced The Giver
The setting here reminded me a lot of the 1998 film, Pleasantville (although the use of black and white during the opening scenes probably contributed to that fact).
The most immediately striking thing about "The Giver" is that it begins entirely in black and white, giving it a feel not unlike "Pleasantville," which was the first film from "The Hunger Games" director Gary Ross.
The technique of melting his perceptions of color into pewter-and-white Sameness pleasurably recalls the anti-’50s satire “Pleasantville.”
It’s akin to the 90s film Pleasantville in that sense.
At first it involves the lad’s being able to discern colors: until this point, the film has been in black-and-white, but now it gradually turns to color, starting with individual elements in the frame (think of the little girl’s coat in “Schindler’s List”) and then progressing to “Pleasantville” mode, as it moves from full black-and-white to full color depending on a character’s perspective.
It was a device better used in the similarly themed, but vastly superior “Pleasantville,” but Noyce makes it work.
Today it just looks like a low-rent mishmash of Divergent and The Hunger Games , recycling riffs from Logan’s Run with sets and costumes lifted from Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey .
Yet because both “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent” hit the screen first, the movie version of “The Giver” — scene by formulaic scene, narrative cliché by cliché — can’t help but come off as a poor copy of those earlier pictures.
The problem with the film adaptation isn’t simply that it messes with this simple plot—it’s that every single deviation from the book is meant to either push the story into the realm of familiar cliché, or to more closely and unnecessarily copycat the dystopian specifics of current YA hits like The Hunger Games and Divergent.
Not only does the screenplay tap into the essence of the futuristic tale, but it elaborates upon Lowry’s delicate and straight forward storyline—but this movie knows when to say when, running up to 97 minutes—short compared to The Hunger Games at 142 minutes, or Divergent ’s 139, even with the addition of the obligatory chase scene, the second of the film’s two endings (the first one is Lowry’s).
It's a scenario that has been developed in slightly different directions by the likes of The Hunger Games and Divergent, and it even has a scene reminiscent of the Sorting Hat selection in Harry Potter.
That said, the book's themes about the importance of passion, of celebrating differences, encouraging creativity and the joy of life in all its stages remain intact in “The Giver,” the new film based on the popular series that preceded both “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent.”
Today it just looks like a low-rent mishmash of Divergent and The Hunger Games , recycling riffs from Logan’s Run with sets and costumes lifted from Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey .
There are also echoes of everything from “Logan’s Run” to “The Lego Movie.”
I get the attractiveness of the theme of wanting to be different from everyone else (thus the likely draw of this work to those who already felt that way upon reading the novel), and certainly have no issues with dystopian-related movie storylines (one of my all-time favorites is "Logan's Run").
Seriously, if Hollywood serves up one more spotless jump-suited crypto-fascist future where only a “Chosen One” can make us remember the humanity we have lost, I’m screaming “Logan’s RUN” and fleeing the theater.
Ok, sure, the whole planet is in black and white and nobody falls in love or kisses or dances, but there is calm and order, a Logan's Run-style Carousel-like ceremony for the geriatrics, a crazy perma-death sleep injection for genetically inferior babies, and it all happens without an annual Purge.
An agreeable YA riff on Orwell — via Logan's Run — topped with the kind of magic-transformative baloney that passes for an ending in too many otherwise-fine Hollywood adventures, Phillip Noyce's The Giver greets a man-made Utopia with the eternal question: "If you can't feel, what's the point?"
We have a suspicion writer Lowry was just cashing in on a familiar theme and that maybe the school curriculum should go back to “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Advertisement
Though last year’s Ender’s Game set a precedent for adaptation authenticity correlating with age of the source material, the movie version of “The Giver” released in 2014 has had to make concessions to modern audience tastes, in addition to contending with the usual crossover turbulence.
Like Divergent or Ender’s Game before it, The Giver doesn’t seem to want to spend all that much time exploring the world it has asked us to invest in.
But coming after “Divergent,” “The Hunger Games,” “Ender’s Game” and “The Host,” it underlines the paucity of original ideas in this genre.
If only audiences could enter that realm for 97 minutes so that the movie wouldn’t feel so very familiar in the wake of other young adult adaptations ranging from “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent” to “Ender’s Game” and next month’s “The Maze Runner.”
A la Ender's Game, Hollywood has aged up the novel's hero from twelve to sixteen, as well as sexing up the story with more action in the climax (courtesy of Salt and Clear and Present Danger director Phillip Noyce), and beefing up a supporting role to justify the (unnecessary) casting of a paycheck-cashing Meryl Streep.
The 12-year olds from the book have been aged (as was the case in Ender's Game ) to somewhere in the 16-to-18-year old range.
Instead we get a film of “The Giver” 20 years later, produced by star Jeff Bridges and directed by capable Hollywood vet Phillip Noyce ( “Salt,” “The Quiet American” ), as a late-summer cultural leftover, an apparent imitation of things Lowry’s book actually inspired.
Directed by Australian Phillip Noyce (Newsfront, Salt, The Quiet American), The Giver deserves plenty of part marks for its intriguing concepts.
At first it involves the lad’s being able to discern colors: until this point, the film has been in black-and-white, but now it gradually turns to color, starting with individual elements in the frame (think of the little girl’s coat in “Schindler’s List”) and then progressing to “Pleasantville” mode, as it moves from full black-and-white to full color depending on a character’s perspective.
By the time Jonas learns the big secret here (anyone who’s seen Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, and any number of ’70s sci-fi social commentaries will get it long before our hero does) and goes rogue, we no longer care what happens.
Although the movie stands on its own, I can tell you that viewers who enjoy films such as “The Village,” “Fahrenheit 451,” “Soylent Green” and “Pleasantville” will see some similarities.
Advertisement
Originally published in 1993 (six years before “The Matrix”), Lowry’s novel was itself a patchwork of ideas borrowed from Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Jack Finney and Ray Bradbury in its depiction of totalitarian groupthink masquerading as peaceable utopia.
Philip Noyce (“Salt”, “Patriot Games”) reminds us of what hiring an accomplished director brings to one of these cookie-cutter movies, creating vivid flashbacks of memory — sledding from when there was snow, sailing from when they knew the ocean, the horrors of combat when the world was at war.
The latest is The Giver , which boasts a decorated cast led by Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep, and a capable director in Patriot Games 's Phillip Noyce.
Director Phillip Noyce's ("Patriot Games," "Clear and Present Danger") surprisingly limp big-screen adaptation is faithful to Lowry's 1993 young adult book, yet that something that made her tome so captivating got lost in translation on its way to the big screen.
A veteran of Harrison Ford’s Jack Ryan run – he helmed both Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger -- Noyce makes two wise decisions (which belong, in part, to Lowry’s text).
And with only partial success, Noyce, who’s long been one of the best action directors around (“Patriot Games,” “Clear and Present Danger,” “Salt”), tries to turn Lowry’s elegant, open-ended climax into a large-scale setpiece involving speeding motorbikes, drone aircraft and storm-trooper thugs rounding up dissidents into a Guantanamo-like prison.