THE GIVER

With the barrage of YA novels turned feature films in the last decade - especially those of the dystopian variety - it’s a wonder it’s taken this long for the bestseller ‘The Giver’ to be adapted. In actual fact, the 21-year gap from paper to screen is a major red flag. Sometimes the rich texture of the written word is lost in the instant gratification of a moving visual medium. Sadly ‘The Giver’s’ rich, emotionally vulnerable themes are lost in trying to convey this bleak world and all that is lost within it, inside a limited running time.

Australian actor Brenton Thwaites plays Jonas, a teenage boy having just finished his schooling who is about to receive his job assignment for life. He lives in a highly regulated world of births, deaths, families, jobs, even food. A world so regulated it’s void of colour and real joy. A world without Christmas, weddings, natural births, childish play and wild animals - all these and more a necessary sacrifice to build a society that has eliminated war, crime, and both physical and emotional pain. When Jonas is assigned the great honour of becoming the next Receiver of Memory, he embarks on a frightening, confusing and overwhelming internal journey of becoming one of only two people with the knowledge of what the world once was versus what it is now, and is burdened with deciding which is better.