Always apologize, don’t lie, always use proper language, and no matter what, don’t break curfew.
I went to see The Giver and walked in with high expectations after having read the book. In the movie, The Giver, the government, decides that our world is too corrupt with chaos. They have an idea for the “perfect community,” thus creating the world Jonas lives in. Jonas is an 11-year-old boy who is different. He sees things that he can’t explain. He decides that it is best to keep this a secret. When The Ceremony of Ages comes around, everyone is taken through a montage, showing each age and what that age will receive. When someone is a 12, you are assigned your life job, because apparently child labor laws changed over the years. The Nurturers introduce all the babies to their new family units; they also celebrate all the elders who are being released to elsewhere. Elsewhere is all the land outside of the community. It’s Jonas’ group’s turn to be assigned their jobs. Jonas was given the title of The Receiver. He starts his training and begins to see what is really going on in their “perfect community.”
If you’re like me, then you hate it when the movie makes changes to the book. I have to say, there were some changes in the movie but overall the producers did an okay job at keeping to the book. In the book the reader is told that everyone, every morning, has to explain his or her dreams at the kitchen table. They call this exercise Dream Telling. The film makers decided that was unnecessary to include I, however, think that it was something important to keep in. Jonas was supposed to lie about his dream with his best friend Fiona in it. I thought this showed you that Jonas was using his ability to lie.
The Chief Elder plays a much bigger part in the movie than in the book. I feel the way The Director, Phillip Noyce expanded Maryl Streep’s part really made the movie more exciting. “She just blew it up and it was wonderful to see that,” The Giver author Lois Lowery said, according to HitFix.com.
Another small detail that someone who hadn’t had the chance to read the book might have missed, was that the movie writers decided to speed up the first few chapters– almost a third of Lowery’s book– into the first few scenes of the movie. In the book the characters develop much slower and they take time to explain things.
In the movie Jonas’ best friends, Fiona and Asher are assigned different jobs than in the book. This is a major difference that impacted the plot of the movie. In the book, Fiona is supposed to be assigned to elderly caretaker and Asher is supposed to be assigned to Assistant Director. In the movie however, Fiona is assigned nurturer and Asher is assigned pilot. In my opinion this has no effect on the ending of the movie but it does change the plot.
Also in the movie, Jonas gets violent and punches Asher. This isn’t in the book and I believe Noyce added this to the film to be the moment when Asher shifts his mind and changes his thinking. I think that adding this scene was good because it gives us a reason why Asher’s personality shifts from the beginning to the end of the movie.
Now shield your eyes and cover your ears, because spoiler alert: Fiona and Jonas kiss in the movie. Yes, just another on of those things they decided to add to the film. Now, if you’ve read the book, then you would know that Jonas did have feelings toward Fiona but he never acted on them. He described them in the book as “stirrings.” Something just to add in there is that in the book, these are supposed to be 12-year-olds, in the movie they look about 16. I feel this was unnecessary to add to the movie and probably should have been left out. There were many different ways they could have showed the connection between these two and I don’t like what they did.
Even though there were differences, the very end of the movie stayed true to the book and it was a relief to see what I pictured from the book on the big screen sitting in front of me. My advice is to go see this movie, especially if you have read the book. It has action in it, there aren’t any slow moving scenes and it is an interesting story with a different ending.