Review of The Giver (2014) by Torion O — 14 Aug 2015

It was good. Here are some problems I had with it (spoilers ahead).

At the beginning, Jonas narrates some stuff. He briefly mentions that he didn't have a last name. How did he know people had a last name if there was no memory of anything from before? It could be future Jonas narrating, but that doesn't really work either.

The way Jonas acted after being taught emotions seemed a bit too careless. He basically went around providing evidence of him being a 'divergent' (lol), and doing things that would obviously cause disruptions in society. And almost immediately once he knew about the 'memory barrier' or whatever, he knew that crossing it would return everyone's memory and emotions and everything... somehow. Why didn't he just go and do that right away? That was Jeff Bridges' end goal the whole time anyway, so why not? Also, why didn't he just tell Jonas since he basically has free reign to do whatever the hell he wants? He must know everything there is to know, so he could most likely help Jonas get out since he's being too lazy to go himself. Jonas had a friend who was a fricken pilot, allowed to fly 'over the edge' and beyond, and they didn't even think to use one of those nifty plane things. Seriously, he could've been there and back in a day. I vaguely remember some things from the book, but I think this is a flaw both the book and movie have.

The ending is symbolic and all that, but kind of a cop out. Not only that, but it doesn't really make much sense. He finds a dwelling, I mean, 'home' with the baby after crossing the memory barrier thing and it ends with him going to it. First off, that 'home' had Christmas lights and they were singing some carol inside. That means other people existed outside the memory barrier and decided not to ever make contact with Jonas' community living on a big plateau, and also that they had no idea they existed. I won't start listing questions, because that whole scenario doesn't make any sense. Another suggestive scenario that I personally find more meaningful and makes sense is that Jonas hallucinated the house. The 'home' was the last thing Jonas found before he passed out dead in the snow with the baby. Granted, Jonas unintentionally killed a baby, but he got closure and one of his last thoughts was that he would return to find Fiona again, further suggesting he was 'leaving', as in passing away, as in dying. Finally, the last scenario, and probably dumbest one, is that the house is still standing after whatever devastating event caused humans to cut themselves off from emotions and whatnot, with no one inside but a radio blasting Christmas carols. It would be kind of cool if it turned out that the community had only been relatively new and just as fast fell apart right after they created it. No one in the community has memory so they wouldn't know when anything from the past really happened, and 'the giver' doesn't seem to know either. But that's just my dumb theory.

Now, something cool that I personally would've found really awesome, would be the use of the senses. Already the images go back and forth from black and white to colored, and stuff in-between. The color was shown in tangent with Jonas' ability to 'see beyond', which was kind of cool. The other thing they could've done cooler things with was the sound/music. Before Jonas' learned about 'hearing beyond' the viewer already had music being played for them. How cool would it have been if the entire first part was just sounds, and then once Jonas learned about music the movie only then began using music. I don't know, that's just something I would've liked to see. I mean hear.

There were other inconsistencies, but this movie did pretty good. Yeee.