Director: Phillip Noyce
Cast: Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Brenton Thwaites, Odeya Rush
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0435651/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Rating: 3/5
Certificate: 12A
Source: Cinema!

Plot

“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.”

Thoughts

So I’ve been interested in this film for a while. It’s also a film I could never fully describe the plot for..

Based on the book and series by Lois Lowry, it’s a dystopian where everything is the same, same race, same jobs, same everything. Then this guy called Jonas is chosen to be the ‘receiver of memory’ and every so often he visits The Giver to see memories of the world from before this society came to be.

I liked it.

I enjoyed it!

Brenton Thwaites and Odeya Rush are newcomers to the big screen and they were fantastic! I hope they’re in more things to come. Also, Odeya Rush is 17 years old. She’s my age and she’s in movies. Good on her! Jeff Bridges was also fantastic as The Giver.

Acting wise? Very good. Even Taylor Swift and she must’ve had like 6 lines of dialogue but her character was important to the story (I’d state why but spoilers)

Visually? Very good. This film was BEAUTIFUL. The shots of the society were shown in black + white, with colour eventually creeping in that you don’t notice it happening. The shots of the place as a whole were stunning.

Everything else? Meh. It was a short feature length film, probably only about 90 minutes. I was interested to know more about the world and how it came to be and I felt like that wasn’t addressed much, if at all, in the film. But I did like that the film had, my friend pointed this out, Christian undertones to it, it made the film that bit more interesting.

Overall, if you’re into dystopians you’ll probably like this. If you enjoyed the book you’ll probably like this. It is a good and visually stunning film but definitely not for everyone.